End-to-End Game Development

Creating Independent Serious Games and Simulations from Start to Finish

Nick Iuppa, Terry Borst, Chris Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136137174
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

You're part of a new venture, an independent gaming company, and you are about to undertake your first development project. The client wants a serious game, one with instructional goals and assessment metrics. Or you may be in a position to green light such a project yourself, believing that it can advance your organization's mission and goals. This book provides a proven process to take an independent game project from start to finish. In order to build a successful game, you need to wear many hats. There are graphic artists, software engineers, designers, producers, marketers - all take part in the process at various (coordinated) stages, and the end result is hopefully a successful game. Veteran game producers and writers (Iuppa and Borst) cover all of these areas for you, with step by step instructions and checklists to get the work done. The final section of the book offers a series of case studies from REAL indy games that have been developed and launched succesfully, and show exactly how the principles outlined in the book can be applied to real world products. The book's associated author web site offers ancillary materials & references as well as serious game demos and presentations.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

New Tools Replace Old Tools

In the award-winning AMC television series Mad Men , set in the early 1960s, a mysterious and massive machine shows up one day in the offices of the advertising agency Stirling Cooper. The machine is a Xerox photocopier, and the workplace is about to change forever. Previously, document duplication was done with a mimeograph, a hand-cranked drum machine that would ink a stenciled original to create up to a hundred ever more slightly muddy copies. Almost overnight, photocopying solved the problem of massive document distribution, accelerating the flow of information in every workplace, improving customer outreach, and becoming a standard tool for almost every employer and employee.

For most of the 20th century, financial analysis and financial modeling was the domain of a small “priesthood” of in-house or contracted analysts who would laboriously build models that frequently had to be rebuilt in order to revise a parameter or a formula.

But as the 1980s dawned, personal computers like Apple IIs and Radio Shack TRS-80s—previously considered little more than toys—began to appear in offices, running an electronic spreadsheet called VisiCalc. The mechanics of financial modeling were now vastly simplified, placing an extraordinarily powerful tool in the hands of millions. Customer targeting and business planning improved exponentially, and few of us can imagine working today without the aid of a spreadsheet. It would be like a carpenter working without a hammer.

With the advent of the photocopier, the slide projector, and expensive and bulky graphics printers and design tools, the in-house “graphics department” ruled the roost any time you wished to create a sophisticated 35-mm slide show or hard-copy presentation that included handouts, charts, and illustrations. If you had an important presentation to make to your boss or an important client, you’d have to get your materials over to the graphics gurus days or weeks in advance of the event—and you’d better have a good relationship with the department if you expected your deadline to be met. Good luck if the graphics department made an error!

A DIY (do-it-yourself ) alternative was to photocopy some bullet charts and graphs onto overhead transparency acetates, and veteran professionals still remember the interrogation-like glare of overhead projections and stark black-and-white images that hurt the eyes. (If you wanted to make last-minute changes, you needed to use a Sharpie to make your edits directly on the acetate.)

However, in 1990, Microsoft rolled out PowerPoint at the same time it introduced Windows 3.0. Almost overnight, the all-powerful graphics department vanished as an institution: anyone using PowerPoint became his or her own graphics department, and new ideas and data could be incorporated into a complex presentation in a matter of minutes. As a bonus, those overhead projectors soon became obsolete.

As these examples illustrate, workplace technological developments have placed even greater amounts of power and precision in the hands of professionals. Put another way, new tools evolve and replace old tools in the communication toolbelt. And the trend continues.

Would You Like to Make a Game?

Now, as we close out the first decade of the 21st century, a new wave of evolution has struck the shores of the modern workplace. And because you’re looking at this book, chances are you’ve heard the crash of that wave.

You may be working in any number of capacities:

• For an oil company, training workers to operate on offshore oil platforms, and concerned about new security issues in this environment

• As a producer on a university website, where you’ve been asked to create fresh and engaging content that attracts new traffic while highlighting the university’s “brand”

• For a nongovernmental organization that provides relief services and aid to overseas populations

• As a principal of an independent or startup game company, trying to figure out how to keep paying the bills while you produce (on spec) the entertainment product you’re passionate about

• For a financial services company, training employees to move into management responsibilities

• As a real estate partner, looking to attract younger home buyers

• For a state or county entity that wishes to promote social change (hands-free cell phone use while driving, entrepreneurialism in blighted communities, etc.)

In any of these situations and hundreds of similar scenarios, you may be involved in some form or manner with a variety of challenges:

• The transfer of training, educational, or pedagogical material to employees or volunteers

• The task of motivating social change or changing social behavior

• The challenge of attracting new business or new customers

You know how your job has been done in the past. For example, traditional professional training has taken place in several ways:

• On-the-job training, which is (1) costly because it requires the time of other personnel (who may or may not be good at training) and (2) risky when failure is not an option (surgery, firefighting, military command, and so on)

• Classroom mentoring and role-playing, which obviously lowers the real-world risk but falls short of on-the-job training in simulating the pressures of the job, while still being labor, facilities, and time intensive

• Pencil-and-paper training, which does little to test the transfer of knowledge in the context of stress, human interaction, and changeable situations (pencil and paper have now been transferred to the computer screen, but the methodology remains identical)

• Some combination of the above approaches, which usually shorts them all (while the limitations of each remain in place)

As a second example, traditional workplace or social persuasion and behavior modification (this would include commercial advertising, marketing, and recruiting) has typically been advocated in these ways:

• One-way media: flyers, pamphlets, public service announcements, print advertisements, radio and television commercials, and other attention-getters that lay out the case for the argument or behavior (or purchase decision). The problem in the 21st century is that we’re so inundated by these methods that we largely tune them out.

• Two-way interaction via training classes, focus groups, or one-to-one meetings. These methods are not only time and labor intensive, but they battle a natural resistance from the audience.

But a new generation—the Millennials (sometimes known as the Net generation)—has been immersed in interactive media since childhood (see Figure 1.1 ). Digital social networking has been available for a substantial part of their lives. They’re visually intuitive and respond better to experiential and collaborative learning methodologies than traditional “skill-and-drill” and text-based learning. They multitask well, but are often prone to “grasshopper mind.”¹

In short, the old ways of training and persuading are going to be even less successful for them. However, growing evidence exists that applying entertainment videogame mechanics and techniques to learning and communication objectives can pay dividends. In an interview with the website Gamezone, noted education expert Professor James Paul Gee recounted his epiphany on this point: “It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were

1 Jonas-Dwyer, D., and Pospisil, R. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

Figure 1.1 The Millennial generation has been immersed in interactive media since childhood. Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.© The New Dawn Singers, Inc., Image # 6945908.

good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science.”

Similarly , advertisers have realized that 30-second linear television spots are having increasingly little impact on Millennials. But engage a potential customer interactively, and you’re more likely to engender a sale and create brand loyalty.

As these appraisals have percolated through the workplace landscape, your boss now may be wondering if your organization should be undertaking a videogame, a “serious game” (which we’ll define more thoroughly in Chapter 2), to introduce new procedures or job tasks. Or you may be aware of colleagues who are launching serious games to better promote their products and begin thinking you should do the same. Alternatively, you may be looking to secure a government grant for a serious game that will motivate social change, such as more conservation or more nutritional meals. Or you may be in charge of training personnel for hazardous duties and wondering if a virtual world simulation (which we’ll also define more thoroughly in Chapter 2) could imp rove preparation and confidence before personnel go into the field.

You may be a PowerPoint master or Webmaster, a project manager, or web producer (highly experienced or new on the job). You may be a Java or AJAX programmer, the administrator of a content management system, or the director of human resources. Or you may be a young entrepreneur trying to launch an independent game company (we’ll be defining independent games in Chapter 2).

But as you begin to think about all the necessary components needed to develop and produce a serious game or simulation, the task seems daunting. Developing and producing any kind of videogame is hard enough. The challenges are enormous. But how do you also develop the teaching points and meld the desired knowledge base to the gameplay and narrative elements contained in any serious game or simulation?

You’re also aware of the budget and time limitations you have: creating media is always expensive, and efficient asset management is critical. Distribution, product assessment, and return-on-investment measurements also must be planned for.

This is more than just building a complex interactive PowerPoint presentation, or a new corporate blog, or the backend on a retail website.

The chances for failure seem very high, while the chances for success seem slim. In fact, the chances for failure are high.

Too often, one element of the process winds up running roughshod over the other elements. The teaching points become subservient to gameplay or narrative; or the teaching points throttle engaging gameplay and compelling immersion. Too often, the development and production lack coordination, resulting in a serious game or simulation that fails on one or more levels.

What This Book Is About

This book will offer a time-tested, systematic approach to the conceptualization, development, production, and rollout of a serious game or simulation. In a sense, we’re going to take a look at game development and production from end to end, from starting point to finish line, on an independent (“In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• End-to-End Game Development
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defining Independent Games, Serious Games, and Simulations
• 3 From Start to Finish: A Walkthrough
• Section 1: Setting up Game Development
• Section 2: Determining Project Goals
• Section 3: Game Design: The Creative Side
• Section 4: Game Design: The Technical Side
• Section 5: Production and Authoring
• Section 6: The Finish Line
• Index