[diary one - taking the plunge - october 1998] "As I slouched back in my comfy chair at home, staring into the dark sky outside and listening to the sombre tones of the 'Blade Runner soundtrack (track 12,'Tears in Rain' on continuous repeat) the ramifications of my decision began to sink in. I had traded what was in effect a sure-fire success for something infinitely more risky. Collaborating with Peter Molyneux over the last six years had been an extraordinary experience and also a very successful one. He is one of the most talented people I know and also arguably the greatest games designer in the business. However, it had always been my ultimate dream to set up and run my own games company. So when the opportunity arose for me to be able to do my own thing I felt I had to grab the chance. Foolhardiness maybe, but I had to take the plunge otherwise how would I ever have known. You only get one life, so you have to give it your best shot and try with all your might to make your dreams and ambitions come true. So there it was, I had chosen to accept the biggest challenge of my life so far. With these thoughts resolved, my final doubts drifted away and I turned my attention back to working on the plan of action for the next few weeks. First thing the next day I went into a 'phone call frenzy'. The first call I made was to my good friend, Dave Silver, to tell him the news. He was the first person I needed to get on board, as I was counting on him being the other director of the company. Although he had known that this scenario had always been a possibility, as we had semi-seriously discussed it many times since the second year at university, he hadn't had much warning as to the timing. To my relief he was still as enthusiastic as ever about the idea, and incredibly excited at the prospect. Dave is an AI expert, but when you look at his background you could be forgiven for thinking that he was some kind of AI!. His academic record is sickeningly flawless culminating in him achieving the highest ever finals average in the history of Cambridge Computer Science - although we haven't ruled out the distinct possibility that he may have hacked into the Cambridge network, found the results database, and altered his exam marks... The next calls that I made were to follow up on some of the informal promises for initial seed capital that had been tabled by some City investor types who knew me. All that remained was to convert their offers into concrete funding. Things were made easier due to the fact that I had known them all for years from my chess playing days, as in another life I was destined to become a professional chess player. Luckily we all saw the error of our ways and realised that although chess was fascinating and one of the best balanced games ever invented (due to millions of hours of beta testing throughout the ages!) it was too narrow a pursuit to dedicate your life to. It is strange how life seems to come round full circle, and people that you last saw in the mists of your past turn up again in the future in totally new surroundings. I firmed up several meetings for later that week, which meant that two tasks urgently needed doing. A detailed business plan would have to be drafted up, and a name needed to be chosen for the new company. Now business plans are one of the most tedious and time consuming things that anybody attempting to getting funding for a start-up has to do. Unfortunately a sound business plan is a totally essential prerequisite to have any chance of getting funding and actually useful to the company later on. A few all night sessions later and it had been thrashed out, printed and bound. Trying to come up with a cool and vaguely relevant name that no one else has used before may sound like a trivial undertaking, but I have been involved with doing this on three separate occasions in the past and each time it has grotesquely deformed into a nightmare job! This time I came up with a list of a dozen or so possible names and ran them past Dave. We decided we liked Axiom Software and Elixir Studios the best, but when I checked the names out we found that there was Axiom 'everything under the sun' Ltd, so that made the decision for us and we went with Elixir. For once it had been a relatively painless taskl The dictionary offered the rather flamboyant definition of elixir as 'the quintessential part of any substance'. Obviously I had no clue as to what this meant but it sounded good all the same. So, armed with my makeshift business plan and some press cuttings of Theme Park, I was ready to take on the might of the City sharks. The battles were just beginning. In my mind I also knew who else I wanted in the team, now there was just the small matter of convincing them to risk all and join the new venture... © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary two - constructing the team - november 1998] A publisher once told me that he had stopped trying to sign companies and instead was interested only in signing the individuals that made up the talent of the company. He felt that the people in a development house were everything and I couldn’t agree more. Names and faces started spinning round my head as I sat down and carefully considered who I wanted to join Elixir. I was conscious that the choices I made now would be crucially important. The founding members had to be just right as they would set the tone of the whole company and be instrumental in creating a good working atmosphere. Not only would they have to be the most talented people I knew for their respective positions, but also really enthusiastic and passionate about games. Another important point I had picked up from working in small teams is that everyone had to get on and the simplest way of ensuring this is to make sure everyone is nice. Even one bad egg can spoil the spirit of a small company. However, people with all the above qualities are extremely rare. But after much painstaking deliberation I had, on paper at least, a team I was really happy with. Assuming I could persuade everyone, I felt the assembled team would be capable of rivalling any in the world. I first met Joe McDonagh while still at Lionhead. He bounced into the office clutching a huge cloth covered in hexagons, several folders stuffed full of well-used paper and a handful of Citadel miniatures. As he proceeded to lay the cloth out on the table and explain to me the rules of a new game he had invented, the situation felt more like some sort of bizarre wargaming gathering than a job interview! I was expecting something out of the ordinary given that his application consisted of a bottle containing a message (authentically tea-stained of course) from a person shipwrecked on the stifling island of ‘Korporate’ (he worked for a blue chip company). It did cross my mind that this person might well be insane, but also probably very creative, thus I had immediately called Joe in for an interview. Following the handbook of good interview techniques, I decided to probe him about his purported interests. He had listed a multitude of activities as diverse as origami and boxing for Oxford University. But after only narrowly beating him in a race to make the classic origami model, the crane, I wisely decided against testing out his boxing skills. So a whole fun afternoon of game playing later and I had decided that I was going to give Joe the job. His enthusiasm and commitment impressed me and most importantly he passionately loved his games. My initial suspicions, though, had been confirmed, as clearly he was crazy (after all, what sort of man comes to a job interview armed with origami papers in his wallet?) but that would just mean he would fit in all the more. Luckily he hadn’t started at Lionhead yet by the time I had left, so with a little persuasion (and after a few pints worth of bribes) I had convinced him to give up his dream job to follow a dream and become one of the founders of Elixir. The next person on my ‘hit’ list was Tim Clarke. We met at Cambridge where he was studying for a Masters in Theoretical Physics. Besides his academic stuff, he was always tinkering with something of his own. I remember once clambering up the four flights of stairs to his room (a long way in those lazy student days) but thinking it was well worth it after being blown away by the stuff he showed me. He also somehow found time in between his studies to write a successful game for Apogee Software. Tim has been a hardcore hacker for as long as he can remember. During one summer whilst still at school he wrote a demo so cool that it became a phenomenon on the Internet. Called the Mars Demo, it was a fly-by over Mars with the planet’s terrain rendered in real time. As a result, he was headhunted by NASA and spent a summer in Washington, D.C. When he is programming he always has at least five thousand windows open (all in an eye destroying four-point font) and can normally be caught typing furiously in a trance-like state. He likes programming in the dark and with his blue screen, backlighting his intensely focused face, he looks like a man possessed, which of course he is. Now this description might have conjured up an image in your mind of a long-haired, wimpy geek. However, as with all stereotypes, this is only partially true as he has a short crew cut and also happens to powerlift for Britain in his spare time. He regularly recounts Herculean feats of dead-lifting 215kgs whilst considering spline mapping algorithms, making all our bodies and minds hurt just with the thought of it. These facts combined with his hacking ability seem to point to the possibility that he may be some sort of cyborg. But cyborgs aside, Tim was by far the best engine programmer I had ever met or worked with so naturally I was overjoyed when he agreed to join the team. He intends one day to be the next John Carmack, and I think that he may well make it. So to my pleasant surprise everything was going really smoothly. Getting the ball rolling is always really hard and now a lot of momentum had been built up it would be much easier to convince further people to join the team. And with Joe’s boxing skills and Tim’s powerlifting antics at least if it turned out we couldn’t make games we could at least console ourselves with the knowledge that we could probably beat any other development team in a fight. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary three - funding - december 1998] The massive buildings of the Broadgate centre, the financial heart of London, towered imposingly in front of me. I was panicking as I realised that I was almost half an hour late for my first appointment with a big shot Venture Capitalist. I didn’t really know where their offices were either. The place was full of confident people in sharp suits. You could almost feel money seeping from the walls. The idea was to approach venture capitalists first rather than publishers. By getting funding for the full development from a VC, we could complete the game and then approach publishers. If the game was as stunning as we hoped, we would get a much better financial package. The cost in terms of equity exchanged for the initial investment, would easily be worth the extra royalty percentages we would gain. In theory the plan was simple: blow them away with impressive stats on Theme Park, talk them through the detailed business plan, enthuse about the backgrounds and records of the core team…… and then ask them for £2 million. I had been advised that it simply about confidence. Any sign of weakness and they would be scared off. Having found the right building, I got into the glass turbo lift and went to the 14th floor. The weather and my suit made me incredibly hot. Unfortunately, like the business plan, a suit is a necessary evil, essential for persuading them that I am in fact an even-keeled businessman rather than computer gaming eccentric (well, I tried at least). This seemed especially important as I am regularly told that I look 10 years old. The lift opened, and I confidently walked into the reception. Inside I was a nervous wreck. A couple of well-dressed and ridiculously confident yuppie types greeted me. They were initially very cautious, clearly unsure as to whether or not I was wasting their time. After a brief meeting they suggested that, as I was late, we should go to lunch to talk through the proposal. I took this as auspicious – I must have made a good first impression. This thought quickly evaporated as I realised that it was in fact probably an excuse for them to have lunch on expenses! When three bottles of wine were ordered during the first course I knew that this was going to be a long day. Alcohol consumption at lunchtime has never been one of my strengths. Of course I didn’t want to seem rude, so I went along with it (ah, the sacrifices I’ve made….). Over lunch I explained the proposal in depth. Several hours and plenty of alcohol later, they seemed enthusiastic. In fact, so much so that they suggested that we meet their boss who, as it happened, was in a pub round the corner. I could see a pattern emerging. The real business of the City is done in pubs, restaurants and bars. Your relative importance would seem to be measured by the size and number of spare tyres you have. I was drunk, knackered and hot. Five pints of lager later, the meeting was going very well. I’d told them about my chess playing exploits (I was the world’s highest ranked chess player of my age when I was 12) and it seemed to have done the trick. To my amazement, the Boss turned round and offered me a job working for him as a currency trader. Why bother with Elixir, he asked me. The starting salary would be £200K plus bonuses totalling 10% of whatever I made for the company. I was completely taken aback. Of course I turned it down, saying that creating games was what I really wanted to do. It was a flattering offer nonetheless and on tube ride home I did some soul searching to make sure that I was doing the right thing. I had already given up a dream job as a Director of Lionhead to start Elixir - there could be no turning back now. Several days letter, thy sent me an offer of funding to the tune of £2 million. My initial elation faded as I read that they wanted 50% of the company for it. This was way too much as it would mean losing control of the company, a situation I wanted to avoid at all costs. It also meant that there would be fewer shares to distribute to the other founders and I wasn’t prepared to accept that. I arranged a further meeting to try and thrash this point out, as I was thinking more along the lines of 20%. In the end an agreement could not be reached. It all came done to a question of valuation and of course agreeing on the value of air and potential isn’t easy. I had meetings with a dozen Venture Capitalists, and they all ended in much the same way. They liked us, but they wanted our soul in exchange for the money. Much to my disappointment, after persevering for several months it became clear that if I wanted to maintain control of Elixir, I would have to go down the publisher route. The world Entertainment fair, E3, held every year in Atlanta, was approaching. It would be the perfect opportunity to meet with publishers. However, it was a mere 2 weeks away and I hadn’t booked a hotel or even a flight. Worse still, I had been funding Elixir with my savings and I was almost broke. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but I’d never dreamed it would be as tough as this. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary four - momentum - christmas 1998] Every May, the games industry gathers for E3, the world computer games fair. This year it was in Atlanta. It’s an awesome sight; imagine a building 11 times the size of Old Trafford with 5,000 games and 40,000 people, all in sweltering 95-degree heat. Love it or loathe it, if you’re in the industry, you have to be there. If taken advantage of, E3 can be a very cost-effective way for a new developer to introduce themselves to a series of publishers, especially as most of the big players are based is the U.S. With just two weeks to go, I had a crunch decision to make. I had been funding Elixir entirely with my savings and I was almost broke. My funds could just about stretch to a plane ticket to Atlanta (assuming it wasn’t already too late to book one) but certainly not far enough to be able to stay in a half-decent hotel. A more important consideration though, was the fact that we didn’t have anything to show yet – neither cool graphics nor a demo. One solution was that Joe was going to be out in Atlanta with his company and that I could probably kip on his floor. I still had to sort a flight out though. The only one I could get was on Dodgy Unsafe Airlines and this turned out to be an indirect 16 hour flight that went via Mongolia (a popular destination. I’m told). Before leaving, I contacted a number of publishers that I had come to know over the past 6 years in the industry and arranged as many meetings as I could. I got a press pack together with updated biographies on everyone and sent these out to them. All promised to give me at least a few minutes at the show. As I arrived at Heathrow for my flight I thought nervously about what lay ahead. It was my first time at E3 and it was every bit as impressive as I had been told it would be. Most of the stands cost over a million dollars to build. It took me a while to realise that there were in fact two exhibition halls and that the second one was as vast as the first. Although it would have been impossible to see everything, I spent a long time trying to take everything in. The majority of games on show were incredibly beautiful to look at, but there seemed to be a distinct lack of original material. This thought gave me confidence for the meetings ahead. The serious stuff began on the second day and my preparations had been far from ideal. Sleeping on the floor by Joe’s steaming feet is not a fate you would wish on your worst enemy. Worse still, he also talks in his sleep. The expression ‘Sleep-Talk’ barely does justice. I’ve never met someone who can spout utter rubbish eloquently, defend his position stubbornly, and not remember a word of it in the morning. Drunk, yes, but asleep? My first meeting was with one of the biggest publishers in the business. I was apprehensive and managed to get lost twice en route. Although I knew their reputation, I didn’t have a significant contact and I didn’t know what to expect. The meeting was with their European Head of Development. He was initially very cagey and it crossed my mind that he must get about 100 people a day approaching him with crazy ideas. I launched into a half an hour spiel about the backgrounds of the team and my vision for the company. I then went through the financials and gave a very brief overview of two of our game ideas. I was hoping that this would encourage him to give me a follow up meeting. As the meeting drew to a close I found myself trying to read his reaction. He was being very cool about it all; again I guess a trait that most of the guys at the top have, that ‘poker face’. When he invited me to another meeting with his US equivalent in two days time, I knew that I had got my foot in the door. Over the course of the next few days I endured a gruelling round of meetings. I met a number of publishers, all of whom played me with a very straight bat. Overall, they were cautiously interested and most had agreed to follow-up meetings after the show. During the evenings I went to a couple of the industry parties. Contrary to what they may seem, these are actually important places to do work and make contacts. It’s like going to a party with people in it that you don’t know and have to make friends with as quickly as possible. You have to be on top small-talking form and try to be impressive the whole time – not easy, considering the amount of alcohol at these things. At one of these I got to meet the great Shigeru Miyamoto, the Mario genius. This was ruined a little by the fact that Miyamoto can’t speak English and my Japanese isn’t too hot! On the flight back I was sat next to some surprisingly interesting people, one of whom was the owner of Game Station, a chain of retailers based in the North. He told me his story, which was incredible. In just 5 years, he’d managed to build a chain of 20 stores from little more than a backroom operation. It proves that if you really want it enough, you can almost always get it. I then settled down to sleep, happy in the knowledge that the gamble of going to E3 had paid off. There was a huge amount of work ahead, but things were starting to gather momentum. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary five - back to business - january 1999] With the wind in our sails following a successful E3, it was important to get started as soon as possible. There were still gaps in the team though and so I redoubled my efforts to find the right people. Nick Sturge was a friend of mine from college and because of this, I’d presented Elixir to him without any of my usual embellishments. I didn’t want to feel responsible for ruining his life if things didn’t end up quite as planned. I was delighted when he agreed to take the role of Technical Manager, in the process turning down offers from the Civil Service and Andersen Consulting. It was comforting to know that he could see the cool adventure that lay ahead and it wasn’t just me. Inane grins, extreme dedication to his work and a large dash of eccentricity meant that he would fit in perfectly with the others. Ian Maber would fill the only remaining hole in the team, namely the art side. I had first met him when he was Art Director at Psygnosis. The timing seemed to be perfect as he had left Psygnosis a few months previously and he was ready to get back into development again. Apart from his obvious artistic skills, his vast experience and contacts in the art world would later become invaluable. He’d be able to assemble a great team of artists and ensure that we had the right equipment and software. From past experience I know that negotiating with publishers is an exhausting experience. If we wanted to get started before signing a deal, we would need some interim funding from elsewhere. To this end I contacted Stewart Block, a heavyweight businessman, referred to me by a friend. He heads up an organisation called AEN (funded by the St. John’s Innovation Centre), that helps start-ups with Cambridge University connections to get seed funding. His background in business is exceptional, much of it gained at a massive engineering group called BTG, which he had helped to float on the Stock Exchange. He was really excited by our proposal, so much so that he wanted to invest himself. I offered him a position as a non-executive Director and he joined the board of Elixir. His management experience would be huge asset to us. Joining Stewart on the board was Nick Gibson, one of the most respected City analysts on the Internet and games industries. His authoritative style and knowledge of the industry was extremely impressive and I thought he would be of immense worth to Elixir. He would be able to advise us on all funding issues and any market research we needed. We also appointed a part-time Financial Director in Vijay Shah. He is an old family friend, a chartered accountant with his own firm and over 30 years of experience. The last thing I had to sort out was the legal side. Stewart knew some high powered City lawyers, called Teacher Stern Selby. We arranged a meeting with one of the senior partners Dan Teacher and his associate Martine Nathan. Despite the This Life image, lawyers are in fact very often some of the most boring and pedantic people you’ll ever meet. However, this meeting turned out to be completely different. Dan and Martine were very enthusiastic and I took a liking to them immediately. I explained to them that we had a problem. There would be some serious and time-consuming negotiations with publishers ahead of us, yet we wouldn’t have enough money for the huge fees that these would rack up. They thought about this and then came up with a highly unusual arrangement. They would waive their fees in exchange for a tiny equity stake in the company. Furthermore, Dan wanted to invest personally. This suited us perfectly; our lawyers would actually have a material interest in the welfare of the company. Furthermore we took this as a huge vote of confidence, the fact that normally very conservative professionals were willing to take this sort of risk. But what’s all this got to do with games? Despite what you might think the business side of things is as important as the games themselves. It has been the undoing of many a failed development team. We could make the best game in the world but without the business behind it, we could end up being shafted by someone. Having a heavyweight team of ‘suits’ behind us is fantastically comforting. They’re an integral part of Elixir, if we need advice on any topic we have an expert on hand to give us their considered opinion. So things had gone better than I could dared to have hoped for. We had all the initial funding and the right people. I had loosely promised everyone a start date of 7th July and it was now the last week of June. That gave me ten days to find 11 P-400s, all the development software and of course 1000 square feet of office space. On top of this, follow-up meetings with the publishers were due very soon and I had a lot of work to do on fleshing out the game designs in time for these. These things seemed trivial compared to what we’d been through to get to this point. I could barely believe it. Six months of hard graft and finally it was going to happen. Now for the difficult part... © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary six - let the games begin - february 1999] Judging from pictures in the press, you’d guess that most development teams have cool offices. You might have admired those pictures of Richard Garriott and his Origin team standing outside their high-tech HQ somewhere on the sunny West Coast of America, luxuriating in their surfing lifestyle. You may well have marveled at John Romero, with his palatial office at the top of the highest building in Dallas. The reality can be different - in our case, very different. With just a week to find an office, we had to take what we could find, which happened to be a serviced office in not so sunny Cricklewood, North West London (Staples Corner to be precise). The office is situated at the bottom of the end of the M1, at a junction shared with the A5 and the North Circular. Spaghetti junction in other words. We have no windows in our office and faulty air conditioning. The full horrors of this situation were only revealed to us when Dave and Tim decided to tuck into a tasty breakfast of scrambled eggs. I pride myself on being democratic but in this case, my principles went straight out of the, err, window. No more eggs in the office. Monday 7th of July, the first day of Elixir Studios. What a fantastic buzz. No windows, an unglamorous location, no teabags and school chairs to sit on, but who cares? Within two hours we were coding. All the work I’d put in and we were finally up and running. We could have been in someone’s back room or attic and I still would have been thrilled. The atmosphere as everyone knuckled down was intoxicating. Within days a familiar pattern had emerged. Hours of silence and hard work punctuated by outbursts of absurd conversation. At first I found this both cool and unsettling. Imagine a room of ten people with perfect silence for three hours and then suddenly bedlam, as we attempt to solve the mysteries of Life and the Universe. Should Spock have been the Captain of the Enterprise rather than Kirk? Is ‘governing’ someone more severe than ‘learning’ them? Keegan, Venison and Waddle: the worst footballing haircuts ever? Then of course, there are the games. I know this sounds strange, but a lot of people in the industry don’t actually play games. For us, it’s the reason we’re in it. In fact, we’ll play anything. Cards, Role-Playing Games, Rock paper Scissors or Fantasy Football – we’ll play anything given half a chance. I could attempt to rationalize this, and frequently do by claiming that it gives a different insight into the mysteries of ‘Gameplay’ (particularly multiplayer). The reality probably has more to do with my burning desire to play and win something, anything, as long as it’s a game. Occasionally we take this too far. For instance, the office game of Diplomacy was ill advised to say the least. If you don’t already know, Diplomacy is a classic Board game that places the players as leaders of European countries in 1901. The mechanics and the combat system are as simple as you can get ( i.e. two armies beats one). The gameplay is in the relationship between the players themselves. By cajoling, bribing, threatening and, frequently, lying, players try to stitch each other up. In other words, not the sort of thing you want to play with new business associates. Everyone got into the spirit of things pretty sharpish and soon enough, knives, boots and fists were all being employed as legitimate negotiating techniques. Not surprisingly, things got a bit ugly and several reputations were tarnished. The board is now languishing at the back of the office, stuck forlornly on Spring 1908. Meanwhile, work itself was intense. The programmers had got stuck into the Libraries (the basic building blocks of all programs) and few people were leaving before ten o’clock. On the back of E3, I was negotiating with four publishers. Key to this whole process were the game designs. Of the fifteen that we had, we had settled on two. What I normally do is let an idea sit in my head for a couple of weeks and let it ferment. When I’m happy with the overall concept I’ll talk it through with the others and see if people get excited about it. I had written up synopses for these, each about six sides long. That’s more than enough space to get the main concept and features of the game across. They begin with an introduction to the gameplay with details of what you’d expect the player to be doing for the first five to ten minutes. Next there’s a bullet point guide to the plot, story and characters. The third section is a feature list of the game’s cool technical aspects. We also included some conceptual art and descriptions of the overall graphical style. There’s no secret to selling these designs to publishers. Enthusiasm is everything. If you’re not absolutely gagging to make your game, how can you expect someone else to pay you to do it? And that’s fair enough, because what is it that drives people to sacrifice friends, weekends and sleep? It’s the desire to create and play the game of your dreams. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary seven - closing the deal - march 1999] Elixir was now two months old and despite all of the talk, we still hadn’t signed a publishing deal. The European Computer Trade Show, ECTS, takes place in London at the beginning of September. My main focus at the show was getting the deal signed as soon as possible. We were talking to four publishers and they were keen to sign us up. The choice of publisher is probably about as important as it gets for a developer. And that’s where it gets tricky. You might think that it comes down to who offers you the most money, but it’s not as simple as that. Ultimately we turned down a bigger offer than the one we took. In my mind at least, there are five key issues to consider. Money is obviously very important and comes in two forms – up front payments and royalties. Some developers prefer to get hefty up front payments and settle for royalty rates as low as one or two percent. If you’re confident though, it’s probably better settle for lower up fronts in exchange for better royalty rates. The second consideration is the power of the publisher at retail. This is hugely important. You need a publisher with distribution muscle. Do they have the power to get your game on shelves around the world? Are they as strong in the American and Japanese markets as they are in Europe? How convincing is their sales operation? The third concern is marketing. It’s fashionable amongst developers to denigrate the importance of marketing. I don’t subscribe to this point of view at all. A strong marketing team with enthusiasm and ideas can make a real difference. Are they prepared to spend money on pushing your game? Do the people themselves play and understand games? The fourth consideration is the issue of the people themselves. Are you confident that you can build a successful working relationship with a particular team of people? Unfortunately, this part is the least scientific. Much of it comes down to gut instinct. The final issue is that of your status with a prospective publisher. There’s always a danger that in signing with one of the bigger outfits, your game will be swamped by the sheer weight of their schedule. You want their people to sit up and take notice of your game. You want them as behind it as you are yourself. You’ve got to be sure that your publisher’s going see you as instrumental to their long-term success. This guarantees that they’ll fulfil their side of the deal. After much agonising, I decided that we would go with Eidos. They had everything we needed. They were offering an excellent deal with the right figures. They’ve recently established a Japanese subsidiary and they’ve ramped up their US operations, both of which should increase their power in the respective markets. I think their marketing has been superb over the last few years and they’re setting a new standard in this area. At least some of Lara’s success must be attributed to the really excellent press coverage generated by the Eidos PR department. Their management team is unique and I know that we can work together. I have known Ian Livingstone (Chairman) and Charles Cornwall (CEO) for a long time and I think their blend of games knowledge and business acumen is a very powerful and unique combination. It is one of the main reasons why we went with them. The fact that they are UK-based means that I can take a half an hour trip to their offices and sort out any problems face to face. That Ian comes from a design background himself is a huge bonus as it means that he really understands original game concepts. Ultimately I felt that Eidos’s ambitions and standards matched our own. As a result, the first stage of the deal, the Heads of Agreement, was signed on the Sunday of ECTS. I found it very hard breaking this news to the other publishers, as all three had made us superb offers. It was a very tough decision. Meanwhile work was going really well, helped by the addition of two more artists. Colin Seaman came to us from Psygnosis, where he was an art manager. Despite playing his cards close to his chest, we’ve managed to gather the following disturbing facts about Colin: He owns a Blue Peter badge and he was on the Tony Hart Show once. These facts aroused our suspicions, leading us to believe that behind the calm, family man exterior lurk sordid secrets. These suspicions were confirmed when he revealed that it took him over 12 hours to burn his magazine collection. Rainer Gombos came to us from Germany, where he worked on a game called May Day. He was an immediate hit when he turned up to his interview in leather trousers. A ruthlessly efficient Starcraft player, Gombos the Protoss regularly exhorts his colleagues in late night games with cries of "Attack! You must attack!" The team was beginning to gel. Before I started Elixir I had come to the conclusion that talent isn’t enough. I am keen to work with people with the right attitude. Passion, hunger and humility are essential traits. They’ve also got to have a sense of humour. When you’re spending sixteen hours a day together, you’ve got to get on. I hope that most of this happens naturally, but I try to give the process a helping hand. The company pays for everyone to go out once a month, with a different person responsible for each month’s outing. We also continue to play games obsessively. Usually this helps team spirit but there are exceptions. Diplomacy, as mentioned previously, was a divisive experience. Five-a-side football was abandoned after a particularly violent game, in which I had my legs hacked from under me three or four times. The spectacle of ten lardy programmers lumbering around a football pitch was a sight in itself. Sexy football it wasn’t. It was though a fantastic opportunity to laugh heartily at each other, which can only be a healthy thing. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary eight - juggling act - april 1999] The office has been in the grip of a Starcraft obsession for the last couple of months. It’s undoubtedly a very good game. The balancing is exquisite and the plot and ambience are excellent. There’s no doubt that it’s the RTS genre at its very best and yet I can’t help but feel that I’m still playing the same game I’ve been playing for the last seven years. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Dune II and Command and Conquer, but I’m pretty sure I’ve squeezed every ounce of enjoyment from the genre that I possibly can. Every developer under the sun will tell you that his game is ‘revolutionary’. Egged on by marketing people they’ll encourage you with clichés such as ‘genre-defining’, ‘immersive’ and ‘compelling’. But how many of them are actually doing anything fresh and original? In 1998 over thirty Command and Conquer Clones were released. And then there are also huge numbers of sequels being churned out. I recently took a look at a major PC magazine’s list of 100 top games for 1999. Roughly 75% of them were sequels or derivatives. It’s a rather sad state of affairs. Has the games industry may have become a victim of its own success? These days a game takes two years to make and costs over a million pounds, which is a lot of money. You can understand why publishers are unwilling to invest that kind of money into a new concept. Yet without innovation the industry will surely grow stale. For me personally, two years of working on a pale facsimile of someone else’s work would be a fate worse than death itself. When we show our game for the first time we hope that if nothing else, people will think it’s an original concept. Of course everyone says this sort of stuff and I’d expect you to greet much of the above with a healthy degree of cynicism. We’re hoping that you’ll be pleasantly surprised. The period from September up until Christmas has been a relatively tough one. Having agreed commercial terms with Eidos in September, we had to wait until December before actually agreeing on the deal. It’s been pretty tedious and most of my days were taken up with debating legal minutiae with Eidos’ lawyers. If I wasn’t doing that, I was poring over a hundred-page contract. Had it not been as important as it was, I would gladly have rolled over and thrown up my hands in surrender. But I simply couldn’t do that. You see the actual commercial terms (i.e. money and royalties) were agreed early on. It’s the other eighty pages that were the problem. Lurking beneath the impenetrable legal jargon lay all manner of booby-traps that could have caused us problems at some point down the line. Had we not had initial funding there’s no doubt in my mind that we would have been forced to sign a deal that would have come back to haunt us. There was nothing underhand in all this. Eidos were simply trying to negotiate the deal that was best for them, as I was for us. It was a major weight off my mind when the deal was finally signed, just in time for Christmas. Much of my coding and designing had to be done by night as a result. I don’t mind this at all though as there are always people about and there’s an excellent sense of camaraderie. Because we’re a small team we have a very flat structure and everyone gets involved in the design of the game. We aimed to have a very basic, playable version of the game up and running as soon as possible. The usual plan is to code by day and then playtest at night. The next day we talk about what worked and what didn’t. We then tear things out and put other things in. I don’t think there’s a magic formula to getting great gameplay, you’ve simply got to play the game for thousands of hours before you can be sure that it’s both fun and balanced. Obviously this takes a lot of commitment from everyone. People spend a lot of time here and I’d like to think it’s because they’re enjoying what they’re doing. There are down sides to this dedication though. I’ve recently introduced the concept of an office fruit bowl in an attempt to stave off an impending scurvy epidemic. These people clearly take their jobs very seriously, so much so that they’ve taken the developer lifestyle to heart. I suppose you could call this Developer Chic. Clothes with holes in are de rigeur. Black is, well, the black of the nineties. Oh, and an atrocious diet is a must. Richard, one of our programmers, is a developer’s developer. He keeps a loaf of bread on his desk and appears to live on a diet of Nutella and Sandwich Spread sandwiches which he assures me is the cornerstone of every nutritious breakfast. Another favourite is scrambled egg on toast, drenched in vinegar, with a dash of salad cream, finished with a layer of tomato ketchup. If nothing else, I give him ten out ten for originality. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary nine - moving on up - may 1999] Having finally signed the deal with Eidos, we could now take possession of our new office just in time for the New Year. We’d been stuck in a serviced office in Cricklewood for six months and we were ready for a change of scenery - any scenery in fact. ‘The Cave’ had served us well, but you can only work without windows for so long. We’d decided that we wanted to be based in Camden in North London. It’s an unusual place, unlike the rest of London and has a very distinctive vibe. Imagine a chunk of Glastonbury permanently based in London and you’ll know what I mean (without the mud thankfully). There’s a great energy to the area and it’s slightly weird at the edges, so we thought it was somewhere we could fit in. Unfortunately, there’s a serious lack of good office space and Joe had spent the autumn trawling the area for something decent without much luck. Just before Christmas, he finally found something. The new office is set back from the road, between Camden High street and an adjoining road, two minutes walk from the tube station. Whereas the last place was about 800 square foot, this is 3000. In other words, there are 12 of us in an office for 30 or 40 people. All of which means a couple of desks huddled in the corner of an aircraft hanger. We’ve temporarily resolved this by creating a basketball court at one end. With stripped wooden floorboards and skylights, the contrast with the last place couldn’t be greater. The morning I took everyone to the office for the first time was a great moment. I really took pleasure from seeing the excitement on peoples’ faces. It was a taste of what we‘re working towards. The building is owned and shared with the Variety Club, a charitable organisation. We got very excited when we heard that of their 30 employees, 20 or so were women. Middle-aged women as it turned out, which was a bit of a disappointment. I think they’re a little bit scared of us. It reminds me of a story that used to run in the comic The Eagle, called "The Thirteenth Floor", which involved an elevator and a door to another world. Our version of this involves a twin-set-and-pearls type accidentally stumbling upon a dark stairway leading to a shadowy hallway. Walking in, peering through the gloom, she sees twelve blokes cheering another as he attempts to climb from one side of the office to the other along one of the rafters. It’s not the Variety Club, she realises, as she edges nervously towards the door. I suspect they think we’re up to something vaguely subversive or possibly worse. Of course if we were programming spreadsheets or doing something really dull we’d instantly be ‘respectable’. We seem to be in breach of the law that dictates "though shall not have a fun job". We’ve been adding people to the team at a steady rate. Unfortunately, that’s only been about one every two months. The industry as a whole is undergoing a period of tremendous growth and there simply aren’t many good people around. We’ve added two more people in the last few months, both of who are female which in this industry is a rare thing. I was hoping this might have a knock-on effect on overall office standards of personal hygiene, to no avail, but then perhaps some things in this industry really are sacred. Sue Chapman’s job is as Office manager / Mother Hen and having her on board has really helped the running of the place. I was a little concerned that she might find our humour too ‘robust’, but was relieved to discover that her command of schoolboy innuendo and downright filth is as good as the rest of us. Our other new recruit, Vicky Mann, is a programmer with a difference, having taken a degree in Psychology. Our initial games will use a lot of Artificial Intelligence, and having her experience will, I hope, give some really interesting insights into this area. The next few months are a critical time for us. The time for delivering will shortly be upon us and not surprisingly, we’ve got our noses to the grindstone. Over the next few months or so we’ll be showing a prototype of our first game to the press. It’s an anxious time for us right now and the nights seem to be getting longer. Tim and Dave appear to be enjoying themselves so much that they’ve decided to live here. Those cool autumnal Starcraft sessions have become a thing of the past. Nothing in life is ever guarenteed when you’re doing something creative. Everyone who does something like this has to passionately believe that it’s going to be great, otherwise they won’t be able to do it. But you’ve also got to be objective and critical about your own work. If you aren’t, then you run the risk of producing something ill-conceived like "Manilow sings Sinatra" or "the Avengers" – wonderfully self-indulgent, but creatively and commercially pants. You can’t let this scare you off (the challenge that is, not Barry Manilow), but you’ve got to be duly respectful. When the time comes, I’ll be taking you through the game in detail and describing everyone’s role in this process. In the meantime, you must excuse me as another one of our neighbours seems to have wandered accidentally into development hell. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary ten - let the good times roll - june 1999] Not so long ago, if you told people you played computer games you’d get a response that went something along the lines of "beard", "anorak" or "no-mates." I suffered years of merciless ribbing at school and college about it; two of my friends found out about live role-playing (nothing to do with me mind) and thought the concept so hilarious, they’d leap around hitting each other on the head with imaginary latex swords whilst shouting "Plus two! Plus two!" The inference was clear. I was irredeemably sad. In the last two years the games industry in the UK has doubled in value and is now worth over a billion pounds. In terms of value, that puts it well above cinema and not far off the music and video industries. Inspired marketing by Sony and the huge success of the Playstation have given the industry a makeover worthy of Richard and Judy. How times have changed. Last month I was invited to talk at the Milia show in Cannes. These are triumphant times for the industry, and nowhere was this more apparent then at Milia. One morning I was there I was suddenly struck by how fast everything’s changed. Cannes itself, the glitz and the fast cars - where did all this come from? More importantly, where’s it heading? Alongside me on the panel at the show were Alex Garden (Relic), Ignacio Perez Dolset (Pyro) and Gavin Rummery (Core). Between them they’ve made Homeworld, Commandos and Tomb Raider II. To say I was nervous is an understatement. I needn’t have worried though, as you couldn’t meet three more down-to-earth people. Despite huge critical and commercial success, none of them appear to have lost the plot. Best of all, at heart they’re still all fellow gamers. Forget the fast cars and fit women; the real talk was about Zelda. Alex Garden is hugely likeable and his story is cool one. When he was 15 he was working in a yoghurt shop. Dom Mattrick, now Vice President of EA, turned up in a black lambourghini. Alex basically said to him, ‘whatever you’re doing, take me with you.’ As a result, he got his first break in the industry as a tester. These days, still only 24, he has his own company (Relic) and is currently sitting on one of the hottest games of 1999 (Homeworld – one of the games I’m most excited about this year). We struck up a friendship and when he came to London recently, we went out for some beers at the Sports café in London. Ignacio Perez Dolset is also very likeable and I think his story is very unusual. Before setting-up Pyro he ran a distribution company. As he tells it, having set-up Pyro with his brother, one day they realised they needed a designer so he decided to try his hand. The thing I found very interesting was that they made a board game version of Commandos to help in the design of the game. It’s a cool idea and it really focuses in on the gameplay at early stage. It’s also a relatively rare example of something that I’m always going on about, which is the need to look towards other types of games for inspiration. I think board games and traditional RPGs in particular are very under-rated by a lot of people in the industry. I think this approach can pay big dividends (particularly with regards to multiplayer) and this is apparent in the way Commandos plays. I love squad-based tactical games and I’ve done so since first playing Rebel Star on the Spectrum and then Laser squad on my old Amiga. The last member of the panel was Gavin Rummery, who made Tomb Raider II. Despite having a PhD from Cambridge Gavin decided that academia wasn’t for him and opted for games instead. I think his experience is reflective of a pattern I’ve noticed more and more over the last couple of years. Where once they would have been swallowed up by the City to work on databases, increasingly the best academic programmers are coming to work in the games industry. And as the physics, AI and graphics in games become more sophisticated, academic training will become increasingly important. In fact, in many areas the games industry is in actually leading academia. Unfortunately I think the days of being able to hack up something up in your bedroom with a few mates are drawing to close. We’ve really had our noses to the grindstone over the last two months. At various points throughout the development cycle a developer has milestones that are set by the publisher. If you fail to meet these satisfactorily you run the risk of defaulting on your publishing deal. Our first milestone was at the end of March and we wanted to not only pass it, but to do so well. Much of the relationship between a publisher and a developer is based on trust and so it meant a lot to us to get off to a good start with Eidos. In the event I think they were pleased with what we showed them. I did though face one unexpected hurdle, when Ian Livingstone discovered our new table football table and challenged me to a match. Ian’s no mean player – he is rumoured to have been Hull University doubles champion with Steve Jackson – but what a terrible situation to put me in. Good business sense should have prevailed here. A battling defeat at the hands of Eidos’s Chairman (in the face of the superior table-footballing skills) would’ve been just the ticket. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere though; a game is a game after all. I won 6 – 3. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary eleven - balancing act - july 1999] One of the biggest challenges any developer faces is that of how many games to make and when to make them. The problem, as ever, lies in the need to balance monetary and creative considerations. Having signed their first publishing agreement, many developers put as many games as possible into production. The reason for this is financial insecurity. At any stage a publisher may decide to can your game. As developers rely on their publisher as their only source of income, this can have disastrous consequences. By having a number of games in concurrent production you’re clearly reducing this risk. One developer I know of has a tripod system where at any one time they have three games in production. The idea is that if you lose one, then the other two will keep the company up. There are though problems with this. When a company grows past a certain size, you need a more formal management set-up. With a small team you can keep a flat hierarchy, which is great for morale. People aren’t so hung up on job roles and are more willing to roll their sleeves up to get things done. One of the things that most pleased me recently was the sight of the entire company helping the office manager to stuff envelopes for a mailout! Another problem is the speed of growth. To put three projects into production you’ll probably need to find forty to sixty staff in a very short period of time. You can do this, but at a price. Making sure that you recruit the right people is just about the most important thing you’ll ever do. Making games is a lifestyle not a job and as such you’re often with the same people for six days a week, for anything up to sixteen hours a day, sometimes under incredibly stressful conditions. To do this successfully you need a tightknit team, preferably consisting of people who get on so well that that they’re actually working for each other rather than for themselves or the company. Finding forty to sixty people of the requisite calibre, and then moulding them into such a team is extremely difficult, more so if you’re trying to do it in short space of time. It’s far better to grow gradually and organically. Our objective is to keep Elixir at a size of twenty to twenty five people for the foreseeable future. We’re taking on people at a rate of about one every other month. We’re still looking for more, but it’s very hard finding the right people. The reason for this is that you’re looking for two things in potential team members. Firstly, obviously, they’ve got to be very talented. Secondly, they’ve got to have the right attitude, with drive and enthusiasm. I see the relationship between talent and attitude as a little like that of a racing car and it’s driver. Whereas a good driver can get the most out of an average car (like Schumacher in his first season at Benetton), a poor driver will always underperform, irrespective of the quality of his car (such as David Coulthard in the Maclaren). There are few things I dislike more than wasted talent, which may be symptomatic of my long-suffering devotion to Liverpool FC! To make matters even harder, the small team approach means employing people with a range of skills rather than taking specialists. I’ve found that having people from a range of professional backgrounds has really helped with this. Gavin, our new artist, comes from a comic book background, having previously worked for DC Comics (Batman and Lobo). Some of his hand drawn artwork is quite breathtaking and this skill has been invaluable to us in creating conceptual artwork. He’s certainly got the right attitude as well. When asked to describe himself he said "I’m good at fighting and have got lots of women following me around", which makes me think we were right to take him on; an extravagant imagination is one of the traits I most value in an artist, as is the ability to laugh heartily at oneself! No matter how close a team is there will always be arguments. Tempers occasionally flare up, and usually it’s nothing more than a case of handbags at dawn. Resolving these is one of the harder jobs I do and I’ve found that adding humour helps enormously. This process has been helped considerably by the acquisition of a rather tasteful pink office handbag which, for added style, was purchased in Skegness. A raised voice is usually greeted by an office-wide cry of "handbags!" The target of this cry is then forced to carry the handbag, slung elegantly across his shoulder for the remainder of the day. This never fails lighten the mood. On the subject of laughing at oneself, I should tell you about Dynamo Elixir, our five-a-side team, which has recently been seen ‘gracing’ the Monday night tournament at Spitalfields market in London. Our record after two weeks was played six, lost six, scored one, conceded twenty-two. As you can imagine, for a group of people who are obsessed with games and particularly with winning them, this was a bitter pill to swallow. It’s been an excellent experience though. I’ve no doubt that at different times over the next few years of development we’re going to be up against it. Winning is the easy part – everyone can do that. It’s when the chips are down that as a team you succeed or fail and you only really see what people are made of in adversity. It was in this context that we played our seventh game last Monday night, a real derby against the sheer athleticism of fellow strugglers "Who Ate All The Pies". We prevailed 4-1, as the mighty Piemen were swept aside by our own version of Total Football. When it comes to it, we may not be Brazil, but who knows, we may even achieve midtable respectability one day. All of which reminds me of something that Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, once said: "Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is." © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twelve - show business - august 1999] I think it was Aristotle who said that the world has just seven stories. This thought kept on going round my head during the three days I spent at E3, the world computer games fair that was held in Los Angeles earlier this month. "It’s a goddamn gibfest!" is something you’re likely to hear quite a lot at these kind of shows, usually from an exuberant American demo-ing a deathmatch on one of the stands. This year I suspect it was more of a reference to the blood that was spilt as innovative game ideas were butchered, twisted and squeezed into small pigeon holes entitled "Real Time Strategy" and "First Person Shooter". Maybe Aristotle was a bit generous with his seven stories. The extraordinary visual quality of most the games on display did little to hide the lack of real innovation. Whenever I go to trade shows I try to find a day where I can wander around as a gamer, rather than as a game maker. When I’m doing this I really want to find a game that excites me, that I’m desperate to play. The thrill of finding a cool game is still one of the best things in my life, but this year I couldn’t help but feel a little bit disappointed by what was on display. Where was the next Civilization? I looked high and low and found little that induced the sort of butterflies I felt when I first saw Civilization. During the week before the show Nintendo announced initial specs for their new machine, the Dolphin. Obviously this generated a lot of excitement, and much of the talk at the show concerned the next generation of consoles and particularly the effect these machines will have on game development. The most commonly held opinion was that development would inevitably follow the Japanese model, with teams of 200 people and budgets in excess of $30 million. I’m not sure I agree with this. It’s akin to saying that all hit films have to be Titanic-style blockbusters, costing no less than $100 million to make. Sure, a lot of the big hits will be from the Shen Mue or Zelda mould, but what about the gaming equivalents of Shakespeare in Love and The Full Monty ? Id, it must be remembered have been making awesome games with a team of about a dozen people for a long time now. I doubt very much that the next generation Tetris, Super Bomberman and Sensible Soccer will rely on bi-linear filtering for their success. Equally, I can’t see how FMV with James Earl Jones will make Tiberian Sun a better game. I would like to think that gameplay will continue to be the paramount factor in a game’s success and that it will still be possible to achieve this with small teams. Incidentally, has anyone else been amused by the fact that Real Time Strategy and First Person Shooters now have their own abbreviations (FPS and RTS)? This makes me chuckle because a friend of mine has these great stories about working for a huge company. He tells me that three letter abbreviations are so popular in big corporations that "three letter abbreviation" has its own three-letter abbreviation (TLA). Seeing TLAs on the pages of game magazines fills me with apprehension – are these the first rays of a corporate dawn? Something I get asked a lot is how to get into the games industry. I really sympathise with people who are trying to get in and finding it tough. We get a lot of letters but being a small team the opportunities are limited (we do try to give a limited number of people work experience placements though). The games industry is a closed shop to a certain degree, but my advice is to try and get your foot in the door by any means possible. I know two producers in the industry, one of who started as a tester and the other in technical support. My story is much the same. When I was 14 I entered a competition in Amiga Power in which the prize was a job at Bullfrog. Unfortunately I came second (to Mike Diskett, Syndicate Wars creator and Mucky Foot co-founder). I phoned up anyway and managed to get a week's work experience at Bullfrog. Off the back of that, after I finished school I wrangled first a summer job and then a year there. I started off as a level designer and a tester on a teaboy’s salary. By working very hard I was given more and more responsibilty until ultimately I ended up co-creating Theme Park with Peter. It was a thrill and an honour to work on a game that so many people liked. It gave me my first taste of the professional side of the industry and ever since then I felt it’s been a great privilege to work in such a great area. I really wish people in a similar situation the very best of luck. Stick at it; as with everything in life, at the end of the day it’s how much you want it that will see you through. The next deadline is almost upon us. Every couple of months Eidos hold a publishing meeting which is attended by the heads of all of their subsidiaries. It’s both professional and brutal. Different developers take turns to present their game and the progress that has been made since the last meeting. This will be our first and it goes without saying that we’ve got to make a big impression. My social life is now a pathetic shadow of its former self and I’ve been considering moving into the office. I’d better hurry though, as spaces are going fast…… © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary thirteen - from the hip - september 1999] There’s a huge debate in the media at the moment about violence and computer games. It reminds me a bit of the time when parents debated the effect of Grange Hill on young minds. The BBC even had a live debate featuring parents in cords. Don’t laugh – it actually happened. During May a large number of games companies, including Id, Sony and Eidos, were cited in a $130 million lawsuit by the families of three victims killed in last year’s school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Another massacre, this time in Littleton, Colorado, further fuelled media hysteria. Computer games create killers, or so they say at least. For the record, I’d like to say that I think it’s totally unfair to blame this kind of violence on games. I would suggest that it’s the laws that allow people to walk around with more guns than a small army that might be the problem. That this doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world with anything like the same frequency would seem to support this. In Europe and Japan we play the same games, watch the same movies and listen to the same music, so why doesn’t this sort of thing happen here? The reason: guns. Having said that though, if the games industry is actually serious about becoming mass-market then we have to start taking more responsibility for what we create. We need to come up with more creative and imaginative ways of engaging people in the increasingly complex environments we create. Gratuitously killing everything that moves seems like a pretty basic premise for a game, even if you are doing it in gloriously realised graphical worlds. I think that up to now that’s been great, after all we all love our Quake. But for how much longer can we justify churning out the same stuff? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that certain types of game will die out, as there will always be a place for deathmatching. I just think that we will start to see a new breed of games that hitherto we could have only dreamed of. After making Theme Park I spent a lot of time thinking about the reasons why the game was as successful as it was. I still find it hard to believe that it’s sold over four million units. It’s still in the top twenty, five years after its release. One of the main reasons for its success, I think, is that there’s no violence in it at all. Many women and children bought and played Theme Park for this reason.I’ve been looking at game sales over the last couple of years and there are a number of games that have been extraordinarily successful without so much as a gun in sight. Sim City 3000 has already sold over two million copies. Microsoft’s Flight Sim ’98 has sold a staggering four million copies. Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Designer ‘game’ got to number one in the charts in the States. At the very least these games prove that you don’t need large amounts of blood to make a hit game. There are two reasons why games have historically relied heavily on violence. Firstly, gamesplayers were typically adolescent (or at least the first generation was). Secondly, the technology limited gaming environments, making interaction on a level above the immediate and violent impractical. Before the Playstation revolution, a very large number of gamers were men aged 16 to 25. Violence obviously appeals as a theme, a fact reflected by the success of games like Doom. However, in the space of a few years these very same people have become largely atypical of the gaming demographic as a whole. The adoption of games into the mainstream has created a new generation of gamers who aren’t 16 to 25 years old and very probably aren’t even blokes. The original generation of gamers are now in their late 20s. As the games-playing demographic broadens so must the games themselves. It’s not like we can blame the technology anymore. In terms of their ability to interact with players socially early computers were distinctly Cro-Magnon. Killing is a very basic interaction and one that’s comparatively simple to program. Anything more than that is considerably harder. It was inevitable that most games would involve interaction in the form of killing and being killed. Now it’s all changed. The advent of powerful computers and sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques allows for ever more complicated forms of interaction. These open up a world of gameplay opportunities. Computer worlds will be populated by intelligent agents with a range of cognitive skills and emotions (like jealousy, hatred and fear). It’s no accident that Sony’s next generation Playstation chip is called the "Emotion Engine." Advances in two areas of programming in particular have made this possible. Computer games programmers are now right at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (or AI ) and in some cases, are actually leading it. Games like the Sims (by Maxis) utilise Simulation and AI technology to create virtual worlds that live, breathe and exist independently of player participation. The incredible advances in 3D graphics are allowing us to create worlds that are increasingly photorealistic. Improved graphics help to sustain the illusion of reality, making game worlds more believable and more immersive. What all of this does is allow games designers to create more ambitious games designs. Or at least it should. As games designers, we should be looking to push the medium forward by looking at more sophisticated topics. The industry as whole can be narrow minded and self-referential. The approach of the next generation Playstation should encourage us to compete with more traditional forms of entertainment like film and that means tackling subjects other than death and destruction. I’m not suggesting making a game based on coal-miners in Nineteenth Century Sheffield, rather that we should take a step back and try something that isn’t just a computerisation of toy soldiers or Cowboys and Indians. I’m talking about creating more complex worlds where players enter alternate realities so convincing and so involving that they experience the whole gamut of emotions. And personally, I can’t wait for the day when games come along that will spearhead this revolution and light up the way. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary fourteen - labour of love or a living hell? - october 1999] The single most important quality in a developer is a love for games. You’ve really got to love them because making them can at times be living hell. The last month has been just such a time for us. I’m talking about deadlines. This month we presented our first game at the Eidos publishing meeting. This was the first time most people at Eidos had seen what we were working on. We’ve kept very quiet about our game, so much so that only a handful of people outside of the company know what we’re working on. This is highly unusual, but something we wanted to do. People want to know what we’re up to, none moreso than those at this meeting. I knew that come July 20th thirty of Eidos’s most senior executives, including the CEOs of Eidos U.S., Japan, U.K. and Germany, would be sitting in a cavernous boardroom in a vast country house, waiting to see what they’ve been paying for. It was a pretty important deadline. You can talk about these things, but it’s only when you’re actually doing it that you understand the reality of it. I’ve been through this before with Theme Park, but for some of the others this was their first development deadline experience. A month ago I asked Sue, Elixir office manager and Mother Hen to get everything in place. She went out and bought half a dozen sleeping bags and filled the deep freezer with ready-made meals. We stocked up on vital supplies such as baked beans, vitamins and coffee. The local curry house was briefed in advance to expect a massive surge in demand and an account was set up (never underestimate the healing properties of a light night vindaloo). Nick went off to PC World to buy extra PCs to minimise the amount of time spent waiting for code to compile. Tim, our engine programmer, no longer satisfied with the two computers on his desk, was given a third. He now sits surrounded by a bank of three monitors, furiously coding from one to the other. By late June we were working at a ferocious pace. It’s at this point where normality recedes to the periphery of your imagination. It becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘day’ and ‘night’, ‘week’ and ‘weekend’, ‘job’ and ‘life’. As I lie in bed each morning, lines of code rather than fence-leaping sheep send me to sleep. Fashion, never a strong point in our office, reaches crisis point. Mouldy trainers and scruffy shorts are the order of the day. A few beards have been grown, although too few to answer the burning question: do all men have ginger in their beards? The last two weeks were murderous. The main programmers and myself were working from 10 a.m. till 6 a.m. every day, stealing four hours of sleep in the board room in between. Although programmers are often nocturnal creatures, some of the others are daytime people. As a result you get a day shift and the night shift. One morning the day shift met the night shift in MacDonalds on Camden High Street at 7.00 in the morning. There was some confusion over whether it was dinner or breakfast that was being eaten. The question on your lips is why is this necessary? There are three reasons for this. The first is quite simple and it involves the nature of programming. In very simplistic terms, programming is about problem solving. And as with most problems, you can never be sure how long they’re going to take to solve. Nor can you anticipate every problem that will arise. The second reason is that if you give programmers more time, they’ll take it. There’s always just one more cool feature that needs to be put in. If we could we’d be for ever changing, tweaking and shaping the game to our hearts content. Were it not for these milestones and the herculean effort that goes with them, games would take four years to make rather than two. The third reason is that publishers set demanding milestones. When you strip away the niceties, the milestone is effectively the publisher’s way of saying "do this or we’ll can your game." And who can blame them? Developers, given their own way, would spend years crafting their magnum opuses, unconcerned by commercial reality. Most of the major publishers are quoted on various stock exchanges round the world, and as such are driven by the need to post quarterly profits to keep their shareholders happy. They tell their investors that their sales will be X based on game Y being released in say the second quarter of the financial year. If that game slips to the next quarter or, horror of horrors to the next financial year, the confidence of the financial community is dented, with potentially disastrous effects. A sad, if vivid example of this can be seen in the present plight of GT Interactive. Three games slipped (Driver, TA Kingdoms and Unreal Tournament) causing the company to post calamitous results for the last financial year. The owners have since put the publisher up for sale. And this was a company that was until very recently the second largest publisher in Europe. You can see why publishers push developers to hit their milestones. On another subject altogether, you can make an amazing game, but if no one knows about it will disappear without trace. As a developer you spend a lot of time talking to the press and trying to get coverage for your game. It’s time consuming but I enjoy it, as most journalists are gamers so you’ve always got something in common. I’ve recently discovered though that it can cause a lot of problems. I read an interview with the actor Robert Carlyle (Begbie from Trainspotting) recently in which he said he always carried a tape recorder to interviews. At the time I thought this was pretty prima donna-ish, but after recent events I think I understand why. I did an interview with an American magazine and they basically invented a quote, which had me describing Quake players as geeky teenagers on a power trip. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks frantically trying to let people know the truth before my inbox collapsed beneath a deluge of poisonous emails. These ranged from the moronic ("I hope the gaming community spits on yur (sic) limey w****r grave") to the hilarious ("I assume I'm addressing a bunch of poorly dressed, acne-ridden, under-sexed cubicle dwelling troglodytes that get their jollies ogling Laura Croft images 'enhanced' in PhotoShop in between twinkies and lines of code, right?") Worse still my own team, fanatical Quake players to a man, threatened to string me up. I think the thing that really irritates me is that I love Quake. I have pretty strong feelings about violence and games, but they’re commercial, not moral (as I discussed in my last diary). Prima donna or not – I’m getting a tape recorder. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary fifteen - why technology versus gameplay? - autumn 1999] There’s an age-old debate about the role and relative importance of gameplay and technology in computer games. Received wisdom says that too much time is spent on technology to the detriment of gameplay. Developers are obsessed with technology and spend their time churning out glorified technology demos that have little to with the man on the street and everything to do with impressing other programmers. I don’t agree with this view. Technology can revolutionise gameplay - it allows you to create games you couldn’t even have dreamed of five years ago. The biggest change over the last couple of years has been 3D acceleration. Graphics have been reinvented, although in one sense this change has been cosmetic. Yes, Mario 64 looks fantastic, but does it play any better then the original 2D Mario platformers? But this is just one part of the story. To illustrate my point, consider what we’ve been doing at Elixir. Our technology will fundamentally affect and improve the gameplay in our games. For the last eight months we’ve been working on a new graphics technology that will represent a fundamental advance over any visualisation engine currently in development. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick and simple explanation of what a graphics engine does (apologies to those of you who already know). Depending on the level of detail you want, each model in a scene will be made from anything between a few dozen polygons to a few thousand. A tree for example would probably be constructed with a hundred polys because it’s relatively unimportant. A character in a PlayStation game on the other hand might be made up of 450 polys. Every time the view in a game changes, the computer has to draw each of these polygons. The more polygons there are to draw, the slower the redrawing process is. This is called the frame rate. So when your computer chugs like a dog when running Q3 Test, it’s because it’s trying to draw too many polygons per frame. In order to keep the game going at a reasonable speed developers have had to limit the amount of detail in their games. We’re about to change this forever. Ceri, our new artist started a couple of weeks ago. On his first morning I took him through our game. At the end of it, I asked him "how do you fancy working with an infinite polygon engine?" He almost fell off his chair. Next I showed him a tree, which was made of a million and a half polygons. The detail is incredible, right down to the moss growing in the cracks in the bark. I had to help him to his desk. For a games artist, this is a dream come true. Before now, programmers have always told artists "you can only have 200 polygons to make that car with." Now we’re saying to them "give us more polygons, as many as you can handle." This has caused problems though – the professional art package we use on monster PCs simply can’t handle some of the larger models we’re making. How will technology like this affect gameplay? Simply put, it allows designers to create a world more believable than any that’s ever been made before. Photorealism isn’t just a fantasy any more, it’s a stone’s throw away from becoming reality. There is no limit to the detail we can place in our game. There are no restraints on how objects are modelled. Players might see a forest in which there are a countless high-poly trees stretching to the horizon. This can only make a game more believable. A game that’s more believable is more likely to draw you in, making it more enjoyable. Developers are on the verge of creating games that are the equal of films in terms of their atmosphere. How can this fail to improve the gaming experience? The ‘cinematising’ of games is just one way of harnessing technology to improve gameplay. There are many other ways. Artificial Intelligence for instance - without innovation in this area you would never have seen a Sim City or a Theme Park. And what about networking? Multiplayer gaming simply wouldn’t exist without the technology. There are also numerous smaller examples of technology improving gameplay ‘on the ground’. MDK for instance made a gameplay feature of the sniper rifle and its ability to zoom into targets. Improved AI techniques will allow players to give formation orders in Age of Empires II. Technology can, without doubt, drive gameplay innovation. I’m sure that a lot of gameplay zealots will remain sceptical. Improvements in graphics technology in particular are a soft target. Some of my friends couldn’t care less how a game looks. One of the guys here describes playing NetHack in its original ASCII form as the pinnacle of gaming. But the fact is that he’s in a minority. Like it or not, a lot of the PlayStation generation of gamers really do care what their games look like, and NetHack is the perfect example. Bill Roper, head of Blizzard, recently admitted that Diablo is basically NetHack and Angband with pretty graphics. Whereas Diablo was a commercial blockbuster, NetHack will never have anything more than a small but dedicated following of the hardest core gamers. Mass market games need mass market production values, particularly if you’re asking people to pay £50 for them. The days of risible 2D sprites and inadequate graphics are gone forever. Contrasting technology and gameplay is a bit of a false dichotomy. It’s like asking whether grammar or vocabulary is more important in learning a language. Obviously you need both. Of course technology isn’t the end in itself, but there’s no doubt in my mind that in years to come technology will increasingly allow us to create hitherto undreamed of games. George Lucas says he waited 16 years to make Phantom Menace because the technology simply didn’t exist to do it before. Apply this thought to games and then dream about the future. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary sixteen - MSO and ECTS - november 1999] Delightful though it may be, two weeks of London’s Olympia is more than enough for anyone. During early September the entire industry decamps to London for the schmooze-tastic European Computer Trade Show (ECTS). Unfortunately for me and unlike everyone else, I’d also spent the entire previous week there competing in the annual Mind Sports Olympiad. The Mind Sports Olympiad is the gaming equivalent of the Olympics. At this year’s event 4000 people competed in dozens of events including Chess, Bridge, Draughts, Backgammon, Scrabble, Othello and Go. And it’s not just about traditional games. This year they had Magic the Gathering and next year they’ve asked me to help them include computer games for the first time (Civilization world championships anyone?). It’s a fantastic event and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s serious about their games. When I was a kid I wanted to be a professional chess player and although I changed tack, I’m still a committed board gamer. Last year I won the Pentamind event, which is the overall event. This year I returned to defend my title and despite its rarefied image, Mind Sports is as competitive as any other sport. At the highest level, everything goes. Sledging, shaking of tables and all manner of skulduggery is par for the course. The junior Chess tournaments I used to attend had wooden boards under the tables preventing competitors from kicking each other. Don’t be fooled – this is warfare. Most people kill brain cells through drink and drugs. I on the other hand do so by playing too many games. At the end of this year’s event my head felt like I’d spent the entire week larging it on Ibiza, rather than playing Chess and Go. In retaining my title as overall winner I took part in twenty-two events. A week later I was back again for ECTS. It was a quiet affair this year and a lot of the big publishers weren’t there. Eidos chose to exchange the scantily dressed models of yesteryear for the discrete surroundings of Lara Croft’s living room, which was tucked away on the gallery upstairs. Naturally the room was besieged for three days by drooling blokes eager to catch a glimpse of the impossibly fit women who were sure to be in there. Imagine the crushing disappointment as the doors open to reveal Joe and myself on our way to lunch. Several days before the show a professional photographer came up to do some new photos of the team. We did these in the middle of Camden and it was excruciatingly embarrassing. Crowds of people stopped and stared hoping to catch glimpse of someone famous. After much head-scratching, they realised that what they were actually looking at wasn’t a Mercury award winning band, but rather fifteen scruffy programmers and artists. The crowds rapidly dispersed. One of the highlights of the show for me was the Sony party on the Monday night. Faithless, free drink and 5000 people made for a cool party. They also had three table football tables and this was where the serious work was done. Forget the show – real business is conducted afterwards round dinner and table football tables. I won sixty quid and a publishing deal, but the highlight had to be thrashing of three Americans 10-0 by myself. I’m thinking of moving our office table football table into the boardroom. This way I can do away with meetings and rely on table football to as a means of resolving negotiations. My only sadness is that I can no longer get drunk at these parties. I think people find it hard to take you seriously if they last saw you face down in a puddle. This doesn’t seem to matter though as there are plenty of ready volunteers for the role of Comedy Drunk Bloke. The best one of the night was the lad I found asleep by the ten-foot tall speaker in front of the main stage. Full marks that man. One of the other amusing moments of the show was an argument one of my team had with his girlfriend. It was the nature of the argument rather than the event itself that caused the amusement. You see the girlfriend was looking after the press for a certain game, which the boyfriend was keen to see. Girlfriend steadfastly refuses to let boyfriend in to see the game, citing him as a rival developer, at which point things kick off. Most couples row about visiting their in-laws or unfinished DIY; these two argue about computer games. Marvellous. Throughout the show I met up with various journalists to discuss our plans over the next year. On Tuesday I had lunch with a very hungover editor of a top selling PC magazine. I fed him gallons of Vodka and Redbull in a vain attempt to fight off the effects of a Sony-induced hangover, as he stared queasily at his bacon sandwich. The poor bloke was in no fit state to talk business, so we talked about tabletop wargames instead. It reminded me of the time a couple of years ago when another editor threw up in a cardboard box during a product demonstration on the Activision stand. With a stroke of creative genius he blamed this on Quake II–induced motion sickness, rather than the ten pints of lager he’d drunk the night before. It would be indiscreet to mention names, but it’s a format that gets repeated year on year and will continue to feature in the future. Roll on E3. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary seventeen - believe in your idea - december 1999] Alfred Hitchcock once said "there are three things that make a great film: a good script, a good script and a good script." This is also true of games. At the heart of every great game is a great game idea. I have this quote written on my PC at work, to remind me daily that no matter how cool your technology is, it’s never an end in itself. Technology enables gameplay. Every game Elixir ever makes will remain true to this belief. Having kept quiet about Republic: The Revolution for the last year, I can finally talk about it. It’s for you to decide whether or not I’ve been true to this vision. I first thought of the game five years ago. I was at college and as students do, I was enjoying another one of those lazy afternoons spent talking and drinking coffee. On this particular afternoon I played an obscure board game based on a power struggle within a banana republic. At that time the TV and newspapers were full of powerful and graphic images of Russia’s invasion of Chechnya. It prompted memories of reading about the attempted coup in Russia in 1991 and realising how insignificant the man on the street is in the scheme of things. And then I began to ask myself about the people who make history, the men who shape the courses of our lives. Who are they? How do they become what they are? What really happens behind the scenes? I then read a short story in Will Self’s Grey Matter, which has as its premise the idea that everyone in London is really a follower of one of eight people, whether they know it or not. The story was absurd, but very cool. Over the course of the next few weeks an idea began to crystallise in my mind. When I think of a game it always starts as an idea like this. I let it sit in my head for a few weeks and it evolves. I always try to boil down an idea into something that’s called a ‘High Concept’ in the film industry. Despite the ugly, overblown terminology it’s an essential idea and one I apply to game design. A high concept is basically a game or a film explained in a single sentence. This is the heart of your game. If you can’t explain why it’s going to be cool in a sentence, don’t expect anyone else to understand what you’re on about. Republic: The Revolution is a game in which "You’re a powerful faction leader and you must oust the President of the Republic……by any means." The next stage is the most important. Explain the game to people you respect and see if they like it. This can be painful; I’m sure even Miyamoto has had game ideas that didn’t cut it. That’s why you need the opinion of sharp people who aren’t afraid to tell you the truth. The reason is that everyone thinks they can design games. I was once driven from London to Guildford by a taxi driver who was convinced he had the gaming equivalent of the alchemist’s stone. He was making a mechanised tabletop golf game in his garage and wanted to make it into a computer game. Sim Garage Golf anyone? Another example of this can be found in the new Star Wars film. Throughout the whole film I found myself cringing every time Jar Jar Binks appeared or opened his mouth. George Lucas no doubt thought he was creating C3PO of the Nineties, a kooky, yet endearingly crap alien hero. I’m sure he thought it was a creative tour de force. Unfortunately, no-one else did. What he really could have done with was someone to say to him at an early stage, "George, this is a crap idea." Or even better, "George, I think it would be great if Maul chops Binks’ head off with a light sabre in Scene 2." Throw your idea to the wolves and see what happens. There are lots of ideas – be sure that yours is exceptional. I took trusted friends and explained the game to them. They loved it. But could it be done? Simply put, no, not then anyway. What I had in mind was light years ahead of the available technology. To do this game would require a quantum leap in AI and graphics technology. And not just to do it, but to do it properly. What was the point if you couldn’t create the entire country and populate it with thousands of real, breathing people? I didn’t want people to be abstract black dots, wandering randomly across the player’s screen. I wanted husbands, students, house-wives and drunks, each living separate, plausible lives. Equally, it had to be done in 3D to do the world justice. I was dreaming. I filed the idea away in the back of my mind. It just couldn’t be done. Not at that point in time at least….. A year and a half ago I finally got the chance to make this game. I found an engine programmer in Tim Clarke capable of creating the infinite polygon engine we’ve called Totality. With this technology we could model an entire country in 3D, down to the moss in the cracks in the pavement. Dave and I formulated an artificial intelligence technique that would allow us to have a million people in our world (hitherto a couple of thousand had been the limit). Most importantly we had the chance to do it. How many developers have the chance to make an original game? A game takes two life-sapping, monastic years to make. When you’re at the start it can be daunting, which is why you must be sure of two things. One, your game idea must be good. Two, you must believe in it. And that’s the easy bit. Now making it happen, that’s a different story altogether…. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary eighteen - bright ideas - january 2000] You've got a game idea, so how do you set about turning it into a game? More specifically, who are the people that make games and what do they do day to day? Over the next few months I'll be discussing the roles of the different members of Elixir and their role in making Republic: The Revolution, our first game [see Edge 78]. At Elixir there are two main designers, myself and Joe McDonagh. The role of a good Lead Designer is manifold. First and foremost you have to provide the initial concept for the game. It's essential that you have a strong vision of the game. You then need a design document, which is usually just a couple of pages long and outlines the key points of the game. You then have to persuade your team and your publisher that's it's going to be the game of the decade. What you want from the original vision is for it to be inspirational enough to keep you going through the long months of development and also ambitious enough not to limit the team's creativity. I believe a great game is the culmination of a great initial concept and then thousands of smaller but perfectly formed creative ideas. It's also the work of people who are making a game they desperately want to play . After the initial stage there are two important jobs a designer does. The first is to generate content for the game. The second is mechanical and involves creating the rules and sub-systems that make the game work. The content side of designing is perhaps the most fun. If we were to use Monopoly as an example, the content part of the job would entail naming the streets, creating Community Chest and Chance cards as well as choosing the style of the playing pieces ("I know, one player can be a boot and another can be a Scottie dog………"). To do this you need a good imagination and the ability to communicate your ideas to people. The mechanical side is much harder and the least understood part of the job. It involves writing the rules to the game, which is a process of enumerating and calibrating key game mechanics. How powerful is a rocket launcher in relation to an axe? How much money should a player pay if he lands on Park Lane with two houses and crucially, are these costs balanced exactly across all the properties? How much money should a player receive for passing Go? This is where the Designer has to make the hard yards, often through the numbing grind of tweaking thousands of variables ("Hmm, yes, the axe is definitely a four and a half"). It's for good reason that Joe is affectionately known as "Spreadsheet Man". How much of this sort of work there is to do depends very much on the game you are working on. Some games require more design than others. Republic: The Revolution is an enormous game and requires a lot of design for a number of reasons. Firstly, the minute a player tries to do something and can't is the minute he remembers he's playing a game. This game simulates an entire country - which means there's a lot of work to make sure this doesn't happen. Secondly, a game in the real world needs to be accurate, whereas a sci-fi or fantasy game doesn't. People notice and mind very much if you misrepresent the real world. On the content side Joe spent the first two months of the development in the British Library reading about the former Soviet Union. The idea was to generate enough information to help us create a living, breathing country that was to all intents real. The fictional country of Novistrana features elements of Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Abkhazia among others. Getting to this point involved hours of poring over books with fascinating titles like "Central Asia and The Caucasus after the Soviet Union". The fact that the player may never discover that the country's main crops are barley and buckwheat or that 6.25% of the population works in machinery production isn't the point. If a player only sees 2% of everything we've put, this implies that the other 98% is present and correct. This reinforces the illusion of reality. These little details give a game its depth and soul. Being imaginative in your sources of research is also important. Hilariously we ended up entertaining Kiev's Professor of Sociology for dinner in an attempt to enlist his help. Equally bizarre was the Soviet library we found in Brixton. Going by the vaguely sinister name of "The Society for Anglo-Soviet Co-operation", it's a vast library of Russian books tucked away in dilapidated house in the roughest part of Brixton. He's convinced it's a den of spies and that they think he's an undercover MI6 agent. I think he's been playing too many games. Another key design responsibility is the Interface. I think the interface is one of the purest tests of design skill. We have a principle here called the Parent Test; the ultimate challenge, this involves sitting one of our parents down in front of a game and seeing if they can pick it up within ten minutes. It's a pretty stringent test. Other than imagination and creativity there are other skills that help you become a decent Designer. An encyclopedic knowledge of games is extremely useful. If you ever see an interview with Scorsese or Tarantino you realise they spend their lives watching and studying films. A game Designer should have the same dedication. Being able to communicate your ideas, in conversation and on paper is critical. Telling an artist that you want a Russian looking building isn't very helpful; Being able to show visual reference and explain your thinking is. An analytical mind is also helpful. Lots of people play games; few can explain what makes one better then the other. TA versus Starcraft anyone? If you can take a step back and isolate key strengths and failings it will help you with your own game. It will also lend credence to your views, whereas telling a programmer to implement a feature because it's "good" won't. But perhaps most importantly of all you need good taste and intuition for what is cool and what plays well. At the end of the day, there is no secret to game design. Much of the magic of gameplay comes from the thousands of hours you that invest in playing your own game. You'd be amazed at how many developers don't actually play their own game - it's sounds incredible, but it's true. Another danger is that people can be precious with ideas. The right idea is the one that works best. This is why active discussion involving the whole team is so beneficial to the design process. Finally, the most important thing is keep focused on the single objective: fun. Games are games. Technology is cool but gameplay is always king. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary nineteen - february 2000] The last month has been a strange one for us. For the last 18 months we've been working in isolation, and very few people outside of the company knew what we were working on. We recently broke our silence and demonstrated our first game, Republic: The Revolution to the press. The response has been extraordinary. We've encountered some pretty extreme reactions over the last month. Never answer your critics and never make the mistake of getting drawn into a slagging match. Let your game do the talking. I'm driving the team forward towards Christmas, but everyone's knackered. The temptation is to slow down in the run-up to the New Year, but we can't afford to do this as time is short. E3 is a big target for us and we have much to do before then. Our priority is to have our first living city running. This will be a city of 10,000 people wandering around, in full 3D, living their daily lives. The going has been tough. Every morning emaciated programmers shamble into the office on their way to another shift. We've added another couple of people to the team, taking us up to 20 in total. I reckon that Republic: The Revolution's AI is about a thousand times more complex than Theme Park's and so we've added a fourth AI programmer in Martin Smith. Had I written a CV to fit the job, I would've been hard pressed to have come up with one as colourful or as impressive as his. He left school at 18 and went to work for Avalon Hill where he playtested the original Civilisation board game among other things. He owns and has played every one of Avalon hill's games (about 200 of them). He then went off to the States and became a professional poker player for three years. Having been thrown out by US emigrations he came back and did a degree, then a PHD in Artificial Intelligence. He's also a good footballer, which is useful, as the Elixir football team has been defunct some time, on account of being crap. We have a new non executive director in David Norwood, a banker. But he's no ordinary Merchant Banker. He managed to get himself into the Sun whilst captaining the England Chess team at the World Championships in Kalmykia a couple of years ago. The team hadn't performed very well and David was invited to a gala dinner where he drank vodka with his Kalmykian hosts. Lots of it. And passed out. One of the Scottish team took a picture of him lying inert, beneath a mountain of empty vodka bottles and gave it to the Sun who published it under the headline "Why our Chess team lost." The Sunday Telegraph wrote: "Feeling ashamed by the side's poor performance and vowing never to captain England again, Norwood said: "I think we all got worn down a bit by the vodka on offer," though he did admit that his team drank less in Kalmykia than they did when they won the European championship last year."" David has one of the sharpest business minds I know of, and he advises on multimillion pound flotations in the City. Just because you do something that other people perceive to be nerdy or high-brow doesn't mean you have to conform to the stereotype; you can be both scholar and lager lout if you want to be. In terms of the game, we've made a lot of ground in terms of with some of the key design issues. We've spent the last month hammering out the simulation intelligence, which is about as hard as it gets, in terms of pure design. Four of us have been locked in a room for the last three weeks trying to decide how to program, enumerate and describe the feelings of every person in the game. This means inventing a set of relationships describing people's values, across issues such as nationalism, ethnicity and religon. To make matters worse, the players will never see most of this work, because we intend to present it in a simple way. Do they need to inderstand the causal relationship between poverty and crime? No. But we do. They may not give a toss about an individual's socio-economic affiliations, but it's our job to ensure that the game works and that people behave in a coherent way. The game lives and dies on how well we achieve this. We've also spent some time scripting out the key Characters in the game. I see these as being similar to Trump cards (anyone who's ever played Horror Top Trumps will know what I mean). Each character should be instantly recognisable to the player, with a history carried from game to game. We've tried to create characters that are memorable, interesting and colourful. For example, we discover that Ludmilla Mironova, a Town Councillor, is "a walking advertisement for Soviet era cosmetics, the living embodiment of the David Hockney school of makeup. Middle-aged, extremely fat and cunning." Eduard Satarov, a journalist has "a huge beer gut, florid complexion with thining hair barely concealed by a fantastic scrape-over." Stupid details breathe life into otherwise two dimensional characters. Republic: The Revolution will have, I hope, around 1500 of these key Characters. I want each one to be unique and fascinating. I hope that 2000 will be as good to us as 1999 has been. We've had a great year, and I feel we've been very fortunate, but we've also worked very hard indeed. But you're never far from disaster in a transient and competitive industry. All you can do is put the hours in, close your eyes and hope that luck smiles kindly on you. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty - march 2000] We started the New Year quickly, as we have a milestone set for the the start of February and we can't afford to lose any time working towards it. Game development has always been a chaotic process. In the beginning you've had three blokes in a room, all of whom doing a bit of the art, a little bit of programming and some of the design. They got away with it because they sat next to each other and communication wasn't a problem. The game was only ever going to be played by gaming enthusiasts, none of whom were going to mind if the engine has been written by an artist, or if the sound was nothing more than a series of minimalist bleeps. As teams and budgets have got larger, the culture has struggled to keep up. Games are immensely complicated and require strict, unglamourous project management. It's not just a question of efficiency - it's also about preventing bloodshed. Every games team has three very different and mutually antagonistic components in design, programming and art. Artists need the designers to have designed the game and the programmers to have finished programming before they can start their work. Designers would ideally like to know what technology they're going to have before they start designing their game. Programmers need to know exactly what the designers want before they start programming. All of which is a recipe for handbags at ten paces. And crap games. But what do you do? You could always sacrifice creativity on the altar of MS Project but that wouldn't be much good either. You're creating a spreadsheet package - you need to leave room for the inevitable changes in the design. We've got a solution at Elixir called the Spiral cycle. Director Dave Silver explains: " The way we try to address this problem at Elixir is by using a spiral lifecycle for our development. Doing this involves breaking the development cycle down into stages of increasing size and level of completeness. At the end of each phase in the spiral there is an opportunity to adjust the direction of the project. We assess the major remaining risks, and plan out the next phase of development accordingly. This way we can have a full plan for each stage that takes account of all the work that needs to be done." Compromise is also important. It's too easy for artists and programmers to become insular and parochial in their approach to work. The attitude becomes "well I've done my bit, it's their fault it isn't done." I loathe this sort of attitude - if you fail, you fail collectively. If you can encourage each side to see each other as allies then you've got a better chance of producing a good game and a happy team. Over the last few months we've made a lot of progess with the art in Republic: The Revolution. Every couple of months we have an art review in which we throw away a lot of good work, in order to maintain consistency in the game world. In terms of the overall style, we've come a long way from where we were at the start. Initially many of the artists were dubious as to the fun factor associated with creating authentic looking Eastern European buildings for two years. We had a long discussion which is still going on. The point I tried to make is that reality isn't what we're looking for. Place like Kiev are in reality little more than adverts for foul Sixties prefabricated architecture. This is authentic, but is it cool? What I want are cities and towns that reflect the sinister reality of the game; imposing buildings that enforce the belief that the man on the street is a mere ant. We spent some time watching and discussing films where cityscapes have been changed or tweaked to achieve such an effect. Starting with Fritz Lang's seminal Metropolis, we looked at Blade Runner, Batman and Seven. The cities in each film are recognisably based on real places, but have been exaggerated to create an atmosphere conducive to the ideas within the stories. We also examined pictures of Prague and St. Petersburg. People have an idea of Eastern Europe that may not correspond to the reality - give them what they want. Even the rundown parts of Novistrana need to look cool in their own way. Miles of concrete monoliths aren't going to look good. We're trying to create a look that's plausible, cool and then realistic, in that order. It's been a slow process and we've made mistakes (pink flats spring to mind….) but the art's getting better all the time. We discovered plans for monumental Communist buildings that were never built, such as Iofan's Palace of the Soviets (pictured below). We've placed them in the game to thereby fostering, I hope, the sinister film noir setting the game needs. News of Republic: The Revolution seems to have ruffled a few feathers and several people have expressed doubts about Tim Clarke's Totality engine. In a creative industry there are many fragile egos and you run the risk of upsetting them if you attract what they deem to be unwarranted attention, all of which is very sad as one developer's success is rarely to the detriment of another. This has made us more determined to make the best game we possibly can. From bitter experience I've discovered that there's always a queue of people waiting to take a pop at you, hoping you'll fail. There's only one way to answer them - prove them wrong. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty one - april 2000] We had a milestone set for the beginning of February, so January was fraught to say the least, even by our standards. I think I had one day off in five weeks, much to everyone's horror. It was a bit slack I must admit. The recent progress is very pleasing and I feel that we're really getting into the groove, in anticipation of the year ahead. The living city is now working properly and it's populated by people walking around doing their daily routines. I'm delighted with the pathfinding; people change direction smoothly to avoid each other when they meet in the streets without that ugly mechanical turning through 90 degrees stuff that you see in many games. They actually look like they're avoiding people naturally; motion capturing everything has really helped with this. They say in film that you should never work with children or animals and the equivalent in our industry is the PCs themselves. No matter how meticulous your preparation, always expect a hardware failure at the most inopportune moment. Predictably on the day of the milestone our demo machine decided it didn't like Direct X very much so we had to take two PCs down to Eidos. We went up to the boardroom and set everything up with Herve our Producer and then gave him a quick demo. He seemed happy, so we turned it off and waited for the others to join us. Everyone else came in and I started the demo. Nothing. I tried the second PC. Nothing. I spent half an hour trying to get both working. Everyone sat tapping their fingers. Needless to say, you don't keep people like this waiting. One of the Eidos IT guys came in to help me out, but actually made it worse by plugging the mouse into the keyboard port. Still nothing. Just as bands famously throw TVs out of hotel windows, I briefly considered instituting the games industry equivalent by sending my demo machine to visit Wimbledon High Street, via 5 storeys and a large window. Despite this everyone was very patient. All the same, I was hugely relieved that Herve had actually been there to see it working before. Eventually we managed to get the machines working. As you can imagine, this wasn't exactly ideal preparation but fortunately we had made a huge amount of progress with the game, so all was alright in the end. We've entered a very exciting period of development that involves deciding on the actions that will go into the game. We're working on creating a set of actions that will provide the backbone to the game and this will be finalised by E3. We can then cram as many actions in as possible after that, safe in the knowledge that we already have the core game in place. I try very hard to make designing at Elixir a collaborative process and we're having Wednesday lunchtime brainstorming sessions to which everyone is invited. With a team full of gamers we'd be mad not to harness this talent and it's worked brilliantly. Not only does everyone in the team feel involved in the design but they've also come up with some great ideas. This week we've been working on information gathering actions and my own personal favourite was Sandy's suggestion for an action called "Grill Prostitute" which we thought sounded like a something you'd order in a dodgy restaurant on Bangkok's Pat Pong Road. Planescape Torment has caused much excitement in the RPG faction in the office, who seem to be growing in number at an alarming rate. The number of fevered AD&D discussions have risen dramatically and some of my best programmers have spent days exercised by pressing questions. Please, can someone put them out of their misery: iron rations or standard rations - which is best? Fortunately I was relieved to discover that Colin our Head of Art is in fact a 15th Level Magic User, a skill earned during his Live Role Playing days down Chistlehurst caves and I shall be borrowing his Anorak of Protection (+5 vs. Beards) to to restore order to the office. A couple more people have joined us over the last month. Sandy Sammarco has joined us to work as a Level Designer. His dedication to games is matched only by his dedication to the local McDonalds, that purveyor of fine American cuisine, which provides him with the four cheeseburgers he eats religiously every day of the week. A fanatical Angband player, Sandy also enjoys talking his Plasma ball, to which he is devoted. They share a room in Northampton and are currently looking to move to a semi-detached house sometime next month, although no children as yet. He's fitted in remarkably well. Duncan Jones joins us to work as cameraman on Republic: The Revolution, a role we've created specifically for the Republic: The Revolution. To my knowledge, this is a new role in the industry and I hope one that will become more prevalent in the future. He recently left film school and makes music videos and his expertise will I hope allow us to give the game the cinematic ambience I'm aiming for. He's taken to wearing a Soviet Naval trench coat and matching beret, which I've generously chosen to interpret as a sign of his dedication to the game, rather then a dubious statement of intent. I read last month's article in Edge about Development Hell with the knowledge that for us at least, the year 2000 is drawing to a close. With E3 on the horizon and a projected release date of Christmas, time is upon us. I'm having to cut back on all non-essential activities such as friends, free time, sleep and diaries. Sadly this means that this will be the last diary for next few months. I hope to be able to continue it after E3, but until then, all there is to say is thank you for reading the diary and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed writing it. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty two] E3 is the most important date in the games industry calendar. 55,000 developers, publishers, retailers and journalists descend on Downtown LA to do the deals that will dictate the course of the game industry's year. For every developer what happens here is the difference between success and failure. The buzz that surrounds your game is a decisive factor in whether or not it will be a hit. To this end Elixir spent March and April working flat out to be ready for the show. It was brutal stuff and reminded me of doing Finals: a big chunk of your life rests on the fortunes of a single week. Most of the team worked every weekend from the New Year and weekday evenings till the small hours. If the competition are working 15 hours a day, I want us to be working 16 hours a day. Nothing can be left to chance. We worked through Easter and the Bank holidays to have something that we thought we could put up against the best games in the world. With over 5,000 games at the show, there's no room for error or mediocrity. We had to have something that would establish Republic: The Revolution as one of the games of next year. None of which could have been further from my mind as I found myself sprinting towards a Heathrow departure gate, cradling the demo PC in my arms, with the words "Gate Closing" next to our scheduled flight number. There's something very comical about a man in full flight carrying a server sized PC in his arms (that is, as long as it's not you). Dave on the other hand showed impressive pace for a man who'd been up coding for the previous two nights. None of which helped settle our now jangling nerves, as we stepped onto the plane, red faced and pouring with sweat. Having nearly decapitated half of business class with the computer, we finally settled into our seats. Stress? It hadn't even begun. Welcome to E3. E3 is about the relentless business of selling your game. You're just one of thousands of developers screaming "look at me!" at tired journalists. You can't avoid this - It's part of the business of making games. The games are mostly shown on the stands themselves, which creates an atmosphere akin to a Motorhead concert, but with only half the charm. It's an assault on the senses and not to be faced when hungover. It's very hard to command your own attention let alone anyone else's (unless you're one of the scantily clad and much pawed models doing the rounds at the show). To counteract this I asked Eidos to let us have a private demonstration room at the back of their stand and they graciously gave us one. In total Demis gave 45 half-hour demonstrations to journalists from countries as diverse as Turkey and Ukraine. Although gruelling, it was incredibly rewarding and instructive. If you're really honest you admit that working so close to something for so long makes it hard for you to step back and see what you've actually got. Seeing your game excite hard-bitten journalists is inspiring. As with most European developers, the hardest part of the show was persuading American journalists to sit up and notice your game. I think it's fair to say that the American market is very introspective (Deer Hunter anyone?) and it's real struggle to get yourself heard. Of the 4 million copies Theme Park sold, only 10% of the total were sold in the US. The biggest disappointment for me was that I only had an hour to look around the show. I'm always desperate to see what's out there, to see what I can look forward to playing in the near future. Of the games that I saw, you couldn't help but be amazed by the demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 that was shown on a cinema screen on the Konami stand. Huge crowds of people gathered around to see it. Above all else it was a chilling demonstration of Japanese power. Like everyone who saw it, I can't wait to get my hands on it. Commandos 2 also looked superb. Whilst in LA we stayed in a beautiful hotel in the Westwood area with a crowd from Eidos. Demis invariably spent his evenings with important people, such as other CEOs. Luckily I had no such restrictions and ended up spending my time with a lot of different people. I was amused to notice that for all LA's many attractions, put Brits in an exotic city anywhere in the world and they'll make a pilgrimage to the local British themed pub, which they duly did. We bumped into a lot of old faces whilst there. Some of the guys from Mucky Foot for instance were staying in the same hotel as us. Gary Carr was Lead Artist on Theme Hospital and Demis and he spent a long time reminiscing about old Bullfrog days. When Demis first got to Bullfrog as a fresh faced 15 year old they used to sit next to each other and Gary used to wind him up mercilessly. He's a great bloke, irreverent and cheeky, and a lot of fun to spend time with. Their new game Startopia looks great and they had a good show. My favourite experience of the show involved being invited to dinner with the UK Managing Director of a large publisher and ended up drinking tequila slammers at 2AM. I tried to sneak off and catch a cab, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Where the f#/k do you think you're going?" shouted the MD. "Get back in here and drink more tequila!" Obviously I didn't want to offend him; dutifully I sank more tequila in the name of Elixir Studios. When we returned home we found out that PC Format, the UK's biggest PC leisure magazine had made Republic: The Revolution their game of the show. This was fantastic news and the team was thrilled. Overall the press response was incredibly positive (one Italian journalist described it as the most exciting strategy game since Civilization). As ever, this won't concern us, as we know there's a huge amount of work to be done and a lot of die to be rolled... © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty three] Elixir has expanded rapidly over the last two months and we've gone from 22 people to 30. It's the classic developer dilemma. You start with a small, tightknit team and then you find there's too much work for the team and you need more bodies. The problem is that it's very hard to find people with the right talent and the right attitude. There are a lot of talented people out there but a lot of them won't fit in or aren't really up for it. Do you a) recruit people and hope they'll fit in and do the job or b) hold on for the right people, meanwhile asking people to make up for the shortfall in manpower? Our greatest need was to find quality animators. The industry is split between people who use animators and those who use motion capturing. Initially we went for motion capturing but were dissatisfied with the results. Given that Republic: The Revolution is about people, they have to be as convincing and realistic as possible, so we decided to bring animators in. Good animators are though are rarer than gold. Colin, our Head of Art, reckons that good animators are born rather than made in that it's an instinctive skill rather than one you can teach. Look at the recruitment pages at the back of Edge and you can see how much in demand they are, a situation exacerbated by the fact that they are also highly sought after in the film industry too. We've been tremedously lucky in finding and recruiting not just one, but two animators in the last two months. Matthew Everitt joins the company as Senior Animator with Werner Van Jaarsveld working alongside him as Animator. Werner lost no time in dying his hair green within a week of getting here, concerned perhaps by his apparent normality in an office full of odd-balls. It might also have been an attempt look less conspicuously normal amongst Camden's hordes of blue-haired, multi-pierced German and Spanish teenagers. We've also been extremely lucky to have Tuomas Pirinen join as Lead Designer on our second game and he has a fantastic pedigree in game design. For the past five years he's been at Games Workshop where he eventually became Head of Games Development. The last project he did for them was to lead the 6th edition of the legendary tabletop fantasy wargame Warhammer. Previously an Anti Tank Sergeant in the Finnish army and a black belt in Kung Fu, Tuomas also carries a nunchaku around with him in his work bag. He also tells me that back home in Finland games are extremely popular amongst women and that he used to get mobbed at games conventions. Plans to set up Elixir's Finnish office are well underway as I write. Republic: The Revolution has moved into a new phase of production, arguably the toughest one of all which is the one that ends with the game on the shelves. It's a time for hard-nosed pragmatism and painful decisions. If designers had their way, no game would ever hit the shelves. There's always more you can do and you're never satisfied with it. That's why you need a very sharp knife with which to cut out everything that isn't essential to the game, which, as you can imagine, is a source of much contention. We've had a lot of very tense meetings, some of which have become shouting matches. You might think it odd that we scream at each other over whether to have hills in the game or not, but we do and it's healthy - it proves that people are deeply committed to making this game a success. As ever the subjectivity of game design makes these decisions hard to make. As part of this process I've undertaken a revision of the Republic: The Revolution game design bible and this now stands at about 30,000 words. It's a huge undertaking and one that requires patience and mind-boggling attention to detail. Despite the glamourous perception of the designer's role, much of his work requires a keen eye for detail and thoroughness. An example of this is the need to use consistent terminology. For example, if you have a commodity in the game which you are calling "Influence" you can't start calling it "Power". This sounds self evident, but it's a common mistake that leads to a lot of confusion. You also need give frequent, clear and idiot-proof examples. You need to check that there are no contradictions or inconsistencies across the breadth of a hundred page design document, which is no easy task. As ever you're striving for simplicity and elegance - to make a complicated game is the easiest thing in the world as it's very easy to be over-elaborate. Pace is a key factor in deciding whether a game is fun, and over-elaboration slows gameplay down. Online gaming is the rage in our office at the moment and a number of people are committed Diablo II nuts. Most impressive of all is the dedication that Chris, our Systems Administrator has for Ultima Online. Eschewing the tedium of heroes, dragons, wizards and fabulous artifacts, Chris has decided instead to be a fisherman. He managed to rack up an impressive 15 hours online over the weekend……..fishing. He's even hotkeyed in "fish steaks for sale!" just in case the action proves too much as a solitary adventurer ambles past his furious fishing and a selling opportunity disappears in the blink of an eyelid. I've tried to put a positive spin on this by making encouraging noises about his 'commitment' and 'dedication' although my animated giggling fits may have led him to question the sincerity of these remarks. You've got to feel sorry for him - I mean, he spends his days dreaming of the day when he can break free from the chains of computer game development to reveal the beautiful mackerel fisherman he's always wanted be. It must be hell. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty four] New team members often produce spectacular results in a very short space of time. We've added another two graphics programmers to our graphics engine team and they've both added some really cool stuff already. Dom Penfold comes to us from Cambridge University and Alan Murta joins us from Manchester University, where he was a Lecturer in the Computer Science department. Over the next few diaries I'm going to introduce other members of the team and let them discuss aspects of their job to give a better insight into the different roles at Elixir. Here Dom talks about his work on the Totality Engine: "My first job has been to work on the sky for the Republic: The Revolution. The sky is one of the most complicated parts of the effects for a number of reasons. Firstly each day in Republic: The Revolution is going to move from black at midnight, to sunrise around 6AM, to midday sun at 12PM, followed by sunset around 9PM and back to black for midnight. The sky has to move between these different states in a smooth way so that the games player hardly notices they're happening. As if this isn't difficult enough the sky also has to support different types of weather, from full blue sky, to wispy cirrus clouds, to completely overcast conditions. The weather will also be changing gradually from day to day, and once again the sky has to react smoothly to the changes. It's no good having blue sky at 12:00, and an overcast sky at 12:01. To further complicate matters I'm only allowed to use around 20-40% of the processor and graphics resources, and everything is meant to look good as well. To start with I separated the sky into a number of basic components, namely the background sky gradient, the clouds, the sun, the moon and the stars. The sky gradient was first on my list and proved to be quite a tricky job. The basic blue sky is not that difficult, white at the horizon, blue above and a bit of glow around the sun. However sunsets complicate things quite a bit. Firstly the sky has to appear redder at the horizon and this redness also has to be brighter near the sun. And on the opposite side of the sky the horizon will be a much darker colour, almost brown. Once the sun has set, things go pretty much black, although a full moon will sometimes introduce blueness to the sky. To achieve these effects I've programmed a physically accurate model of the sky. This means that the colour gradients at sunset and sunrise are calculated using Rayleigh scattering. A few corners have been cut but on the whole the model produces fairly accurate colour gradients. Next on the list was the sun and this is a relatively simple part of the sky. The sun is basically a disc with a slight lens flare. I've tried to stick away from the traditional "lots of circles" approach although I may go back to that over the next couple of months. Because the sun has to be visible as a disc at sunset the flare increases as the sun becomes higher in the sky. One of the coolest features comes from the fact that I'm using a piece of code written by Alan (Murta) that positions all the major astronomical bodies correctly. It really is quite magical because it means that the sun will travel along exactly the correct path as it would were you in Azerbaijan, the country closest to where the fictional country of Novistrana would be were it located in the real world. When you look at the sky, the stars will be rotating round the Pole Star exactly as if you were standing in Baku staring at the night's sky. The remaining parts of the sky are the clouds and these have to change in real-time so the code to calculate them has been fairly heavily optimized. As you can see from the screenshots they look quite good although they're a little flat. The majority of the programming is now complete for the sky and for the last few weeks I've been working on the materials model for Republic: The Revolution . We're aiming at supporting some pretty realistic materials for the game. They'll support features like bump-maps, reflection, specular highlights, specular bump-maps, blended textures, transparent textures, and on and on. It's a fun area of the game to work on and once Alan's lighting is fully implemented we should start getting some very pretty results." Elsewhere in the company the focus has been on achieving an important milestone for Republic: The Revolution called 1st Playable. As the name suggests, 1st Playable is the point at which you've proved that the game works and to do this you need a game level that demonstrates working technology and game play. Usually you aim to achieve this stage eight to ten months before release. To help us achieve this target we've recruited an Internal Producer, Adrian Bolton. His job is to tie together the three disparate and occasionally warring strands of games production (design, programming and art). The Producer has two weapons of choice: the schedule and the large stick. Despite his role as office Governor, Adrian quickly established himself as firm office favourite by spending a thousand pounds on games for the games room, although I can't help but wonder whether we'd have been better off just buying a Dreamcast and a copy of Soul Calibur, which is an Elixir obsession. One o'clock is the cue for ecstatic wailings and violent squeals of delight that thunder through the sound-proofed games room door, so much so that I've taken to calling it the "Gimp Room". Whenever I poke my head inside the door, I'm amazed to find it's Elixir rather than several city slickers and a posse of banjo-playing hillbillies hard at work. It appears to have been worthwhile though and I'm happy to report that their sweat and toil hasn't gone unrewarded, with Aamar officially crowned London Soul Calibur Champion at the recent regional championships. He went on to the national championships and came a very credible third. For those of you who care, the consensus is that Cervantes - a character I constantly expect to launch devastating renditions of YMCA at any moment - is by far the best character in the game. © 1998-2000 Elixir Studios Ltd. All rights reserved. [diary twenty five] The first PC I owned didn't have a sound card and I couldn't have cared less because sound wasn't exactly the PC's strong point. This has changed considerably over the last few years. At Elixir we believe that future advances in game music and sound will, in time, be considered to be comparable to the 3D graphics revolution of the mid 90s. Nick Sturge, our Tools manager is in charge of audio for all of Elixir's games. Here he discusses sound and Republic: The Revolution "With this game we want to depict the epic events that shape a country's future, and your rise to power within that country. To create the immersive cinematic experience that conveys the scale of these events, music and sound effects are critical. Early on we decided to work with an external sound effects artist and composer and we chose Richard Joseph and James Hannigan. They are, without, two of the best and most experienced and best musicians working in the games industry and have worked on some great games like Barbarian, Defender of the Crown, Speedball 2, Mega Lo Mania, Sensible Soccer and more recently Croc, G-Police and Theme Park World. They were nominated for a staggering four BAFTAs at this year's awards (Best Sound: Theme Park World, Best Sound: Cannon Fodder, Best Music: Theme Park World, Best Music: FA Premier Football Manager ' 99). Using external people has a number of benefits. Firstly, you'd be very pushed to get people of this quality to come in house. It also means that we didn't need to build an expensive soundproofed studio in our offices. There's also the question of flexibility; in the early stages when the design was still being finalised there wasn't enough work to keep them busy full-time. Now in the later stages of development there is more then enough. Producing audio isn't the only part of the process; someone needs to code it into the game and that's where I come into it. I'm principally a programmer, and most of my work is on Republic and its design and development tools. However, as well as being quite technical I have a background in classical music, and was very keen to take on the audio programming. The main part of this work has been customising how the different sorts of audio will be triggered and played: we need support for one-off effects, repeating effects, area-based sounds and the music playback code itself. A good overview of the project is also important, as I need to work with the artificial intelligence, animations and camera control to ensure that effects are triggered correctly. Audio technology has certainly seen interesting developments recently and we must decide what technologies to use and how to deliver the audio in game. With potentially tens of hours of gameplay, simple linear CD tracks could quickly become dull and repetitive and would occupy a lot of valuable space on the CD. Microsoft's DirectMusic offers exciting possibilities but also offers problems because it randomises music. If you create a track with a lot of possible variations, the system might randomly play something quite unpleasant to listen to. Instead we have been looking into ways of achieving a similar effect in a more controlled way by coding this ourselves. We have also had to consider what 3D sound and proprietary hardware support we want to include, and what this will cost us in terms of processor usage. A lot of action within the game revolves around in game characters talking to one another. We have various choices here. We could duck out and not have any speech in the game in the game at all but this would have been a real shame as speech is an important means of conveying a lot of emotion that would otherwise be hard to get across. At the other extreme, we could go for complete actual speech, where we script out everything any character might say within the game, record it, and play it back appropriately. This would involve a huge amount of material not to mention the issue of language. Which language would it be in? Republic is set in Eastern Europe, so we could pick a language and then prepare material in that language, or do it in English. We chose an intermediate solution, which was to have speech-like noises that don't actually mean anything. "The Sims" did this quite well, and the results we've had so far are very promising. By far the most important aspect of audio design is for it to integrate seamlessly into the whole game experience. We have decided on special music to accompany the actions, for maximum cinematic effect. As well as conveying the scale of events, this also emphasises the emotions and atmosphere, be it for a massive political rally or a SAS-style raid and assassination. The sound effects must tie in with the animations as well as providing a good background environment. Richard's put a lot of work into creating authentic sounds. He's gone to amazing lengths to achieve this - for example, so that the cars sound right he tracked down the Trabant Society of Great Britain and went off and recorded the sound of a real Trabant engine. This is the level of excellence that we're aiming to achieve with Republic: The Revolution." [diary twenty six] One of the most important milestones in a game's development is called First Playable. First Playable means proof of concept - The technology works, the game design is coherent and a realistic release date is within sight. The Publisher's Marketing teams draw up plans based on the assumption that the game will be released X months from First Playable. Eidos held an internal marketing day to present their forthcoming games to sales and marketing teams from around the world. This allows them to plan their Marketing strategy for all forthcoming games. It also allows the developer to schedule in essential marketing materials like demos, screenshots and AVIs. This is particularly important for the US where lead times on magazines are three months or longer. Ideally you want synchronised marketing and development schedules to avoid running adverts before the game is complete. This happens a lot - The game finally comes out and no-one knows it's out because you've blown your marketing budget six months before release. Many developers aren't interested in this sort of thing but we bend over backwards to help as these are the people who will sell your game. If they don't understand it or have little enthusiasm for it, you can't expect them to do a good job. We do everything in our power to help them as our attitude is that our job isn't done until someone's walked out of the shop with our game. As ever, Eidos was full of amazingly good looking women but as I spend most days surrounded by hairy-arsed developers, these days I find myself dazzled by anyone who isn't wearing scruffy jeans and three days worth of bumfluff. We presented the game throughout the day and people seemed pleased with what they saw. We went down to Eidos a couple of days later for the Milestone meeting and it went very well for us. The experimental stuff, particularly the engine and the AI, the stuff people said we couldn't do, we've now done. Ian Livingstone, Eidos's Chairman wrote about the demo on his newly launched website: "This week I saw the first playable version of Republic and I was amazed by Elixir's achievement thus far. I sent my character to the town square to listen to an opposing faction's supporter giving his all on a soap box. His audience was enthusiastic. Action was necessary. After setting up a time to meet this supporter, I had to decide how to get him to change his allegiance. Argue with him, bribe him or give him a right good hiding? Now what would best suit my personality?" Whilst it's been our graphics engine that has attracted most attention to Republic: The Revolution, what we're trying to do with the artificial intelligence, in creating an entire country, is every bit as impressive as the engine. Over the last few months we've made excellent progress in this area. Alex Whitaker recently joined us from Psygnosis as a Senior AI Programmer. Here he discusses some of the challenges of designing the simulation for the game: "For its first thirty years the pursuit of artificial intelligence promised much and offered little, but then exactly ten years ago with a paper entitled Intelligence without Reason, Rodney Brooks offered a different view of what it takes to make an artefact intelligent. Through Brooks' tenure at MIT he has built and refined an increasingly intelligent dynasty of robots using behavioural rather than deliberative architectures. Behavioural AI systems work from the bottom up - the agent perceives certain features of its environment and responds directly to them, with careful design an intelligent behaviour emerges. Deliberative systems allow the agent to build an internal model of its environment, and use rules to extend that model and make assumptions based upon it. The big problem is that, in general, for deliberative systems computing power requirements are exponential, whereas for behavioural systems they are linear. Needless to say, for driving many thousands of agents exponential computing requirements are not attractive. One of a number of technologies we use to drive agent behaviour in Republic: The Revolution relies on the same augmented transition networks (ATN) on which Brooks bases his subsumption architecture. The ATN system that we use extends the simpler finite state architectures characterised by computer games such as Half-Life and is far more concise. The agent behaviour is held in a database that describes the relationships between what the agent sees (its percepts) and what it does (its effects). We have created an editor that allows a designer to manipulate that database, now the task of creating all of the behaviours begins. This starts with networks describing the simplest level of behaviour - for example, how the agent will enter or leave a vehicle. We then build these into ever more complex networks - drive to location, go to work etc. Finally we create the highest-level networks describing the complex actions that drive gameplay such as bribe official or call general strike. This family of algorithms have been shown to have very low processor overhead but allow the description of very complex behaviours. Because the code driving the networks is isolated from the data describing the behaviour, the designers are able to realise their vision without constantly referring to the programmers, and the programmers are able to refine the engine without being constantly disturbed by the designers. Given the ever-increasing expectations of Joe Public, the ability to design convincing and realistic behaviour skills are going to become essential and I have no doubt that Behavioural Designer is going to be appearing on the games CVs of the future." [diary twenty seven] Demis and I recently went to the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose, where Demis gave a talk entitled Level of Detail AI, which included our first ever public demonstration of Republic: The Revolution. We assumed that it would be in one of the small rooms in the main conference centre in front of a couple of dozen people. Imagine our surprise to find that it was in fact in the San Jose Civic auditorium, a 5000 seater hall over the road. I've never seen Demis nervous before but unsurprisingly I think even he felt some trepidation at the thought of talking to upwards of a thousand people. After the talk Demis took part in a panel discussion on one of those perennial conference favourites pitching the PC versus consoles and asking whether the former is dead as a games platform. It was a great honour to be included as it featured some of the industry's leading lights - Trip Hawkins, Sid Shelley, Phil Harrison and Ed Fries among others. It's a well-trodden (and slightly misleading) topic, but the debate was lively. Overall my thoughts were that GDC as a show is changing. Whereas before it was very much an academic gathering of developers and their ideas, it has now been sucked into the commercial calendar, a place where developers hawk latest their games about and compete for position within an increasingly star-struck industry. It's a beauty contest - code-wise, at least. The overall vibe was conspicuously bad this year, compared to the triumphalism of the last few years. The industry's going through one its cyclical blips and a lot of developers are going out of business. The show began with the news that EA had canned Ultima Online and sacked over a hundred people and this cast a long shadow over proceedings. I've also been to several other conferences over the few months focusing on the excitement over games for phones. It's hard to know what's real and what isn't right now; the phone industry is doing its best to woo game developers but the consistent message from both network providers and phone manufacturers is that there's no money to fund this. Inevitably, discussions founder on this. I recently bumped into my old boss at Wireplay, Kevin Piper, who's heading up 3G at BT and he had some shrewd insights into this market. Right now the simple truth for developers is that making mass market, community based games with fundamentally limited and unreliable technology is very hard. That's not to say impossible though and there are already some interesting results. We've done some work with a small Finnish company called G-Cluster and I recently went to see them in Finland. I was amazed at the coolness of some the stuff they've achieved already, particularly by the noisy game of multiplayer Quake we had, played on iPacs whilst eating reindeer in a Laplander restaurant. I think we might have disturbed the other diners. Work continues on our game Republic: The Revolution and the hard graft and long hours are now showing tangible rewards. The country's capital Berezina looks ever more lifelike every time I see it, as the programmers put more detail into the simulation. Small changes make visible differences; the people now have a number of different walking animations, some strolling, some walking briskly or some just dawdling. People smoke cigarettes whilst peering languidly at the sunset through designer sunglasses, as others pop into shops and come out again weighed down with shopping. Despite the number of times I've seen this I'm still mesmerised by the illusion of sentience. The skyline is particularly beautiful and I can imagine that some people will be content to simply watch the passage time as people go about their daily routines untroubled by the Machiavellian schemes of players. Demis, the Lead Designer and Martin, the Senior AI Programmer have been engaged in some interesting discussions about what actually makes people tick. What do people care about? What makes them support Fascist X or Trade Unionist Y? Getting this right underpins the success the game. After a few lively exchanges they decided that everyone in the game would have views on the following issues: government, religion, political philosophy, morality, economics, violence, ethnic tolerance and international relations. Players attempt to exploit and manipulate these views to gain one of the three different resources - Fear, Money and Influence - produced by every prole. These can then be used to power bigger, better actions, all the way up to coup d'etats, mafia hits and rigged elections. One of the joys of simulation games is the unpredictability and emergent gameplay and we've started to see some very odd things happening. The other day we set off an action that orders Viktor, a Priest, to give a soapbox speech in the town square. As he started ranting, one of the crowd broke ranks and tried to attack him. We assumed it was a bug as we hadn't programmed this; we later found it was because the prole was violently opposed to homelessness, the theme of Viktor's particular speech. This was both exciting and a little unsettling - It felt mildly like being in that Mary Shelley novel. Time has finally come to leave our lovely office and it barely seems credible that we moved in two years ago. There are now forty-three of us and we've run out room. The Board room went yesterday as we attempt to squeeze yet another new team member in. We briefly considered sacrificing the games room but decided there'd be a popular revolution if we did (apposite, but inconvenient). Life imitating art? Not if I can help it... [diary twenty eight] I recently spent three days at E3 in LA surrounded by acres of flesh - Texan programmer rather than LA beach babe, I'm sorry to report. If the industry's health is directly proportional to the number of babe booths at E3, this isn't a vintage year. Luckily I didn't have to concern myself with such things and spent the entire show at the Elixir stand in one of the side halls looking after journalists. We gave 45 back-to-back demonstrations of Republic: The Revolution to the world's press. It was a spectacularly successful show, a testament to the hard graft and long hours put in by the team in the months running up to the show. Every developer wants to win awards and this year we did. Republic: The Revolution won Best of Show from gamespy.com and Best Technical Game from pc.ign.com, two of the largest games sites. In The official E3 awards, the winners of which are yet to be announced, we have been nominated for Best Original Game and Best Strategy Game. It's a tremendous honour for the team to receive these accolades, small return for the lost weekends and frazzled synapses. The highlight of the show was when Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld and System Shock) brought Gabe Newell, head of Valve (Half-Life) to our booth to see the game. Gabe said to Warren: "Have you shown Sid (Meier) this yet?" It doesn't get any better. For us though there is only the sense of having scaled yet another hill on a long and gruelling journey. There's so much to do and so many trials ahead: There is no time for complacency. No one who attended E3 could be in any doubt of the terrifying speed at which games technology is progressing. Right now the industry is at the cutting edge of many areas of programming, notably graphics and artificial intelligence. A by-product of this is the number of talented programmers now turning their back on more traditional industries - whereas once the best programmers flocked to the City to get their hands on fat pay-cheques and the humdrum of database programming, now they're coming the other way. Academics are joining them for similar reasons. Here Dr. Alan Murta, one of our engine team, discusses some of the challenges and similarities between the two disciplines: I joined Elixir Studios as Senior Graphics Programmer in mid-2000, following a ten-year career as a Lecturer at the University of Manchester where I undertook research into computer graphics. There are many parallels between academia and games development. Here, I focus upon two particular disciplines common to both jobs - the development of professional knowledge and the creative process of problem solving. Both disciplines require extensive knowledge of programming, particularly in terms of current and new thinking. The importance of keeping up-to-date with the latest technological advances cannot be overstated. In particular it's vital to look out for the publication of new algorithms, to track the feature sets of the latest hardware and API releases, and to look at upcoming games as a potential source of technical inspiration. One of the best ways to keep up with cutting edge research is by attending respected technical conferences - in my own field these include the annual SIGGRAPH event in the US along with various Eurographics events. The financial costs of attending such events can pay substantial dividends. Be aware that many so-called 'developer' conferences are primarily business oriented, and may have little to offer techies in search of algorithmic gems. It is also important to build up a personal library of useful code resources - both in printed form and as a collection of on-line bookmarks. The development of any game presents the programmer with a long series of technical challenges to overcome. Fortunately many of these tasks can be broken down into a set of previously solved problems. Sometimes the solution isn't so readily apparent, and a little lateral thought is needed to re-map the given problem onto a known algorithm. Knowing where to look for pieces of the solution jigsaw can be of enormous benefit, saving the reinvention of the proverbial wheel many times over. However, on many occasions the problem in hand has no ready-made solution, and this is where some ingenuity is required on the part of the programmer. This process is the most intellectually demanding yet rewarding aspect of the job. I will illustrate this point by outlining a particular challenge encountered during the development of our upcoming game Republic: The Revolution. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with Elixir Studios' Totality graphics engine, which can deliver unprecedented levels of visual detail to the gamer. Republic differs from other titles on general release in that it will feature massively complex free-form worldviews - for example city street scenes that may extend several miles into the distance. Drawing this amount of detail at interactive rates poses considerable challenges in its own right. Applying lighting to these models is another matter altogether! Unfortunately it is just not possible to employ commonly used illumination shortcuts such as light mapping within the Republic world. It is our desire to present in-game vistas with arbitrarily complex arrangements of scene geometry and illumination sources (imagine flying over a city at night with hundreds of glaring streetlamps and building shapes on view simultaneously). It is this sheer combinatorial complexity which makes light mapping a non-starter. Our novel solution involves an analysis of how individual light sources contribute to specific sub-parts of the world. There may be 100 streetlamps in our field of view, but it is likely that only a tiny subset of these casts significantly upon the telephone kiosk in the foreground. By carefully considering each light's sphere of influence it is possible to reduce the local illumination description to the point where it can be rendered using simple surface shading methods. Our new custom lighting techniques are already providing us with thrilling atmospheric renditions of the Republic world. It's this sort of applied challenge which makes games development such a satisfying career.