Greetings, beautiful party people of the world wide webbernets. I’m not entirely sure if you’re aware of this, but Destiny was released today. Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure if any of you are reading this piece because, again, Destiny was released today. It’s a massive undertaking by a very talented team, and they deserve their moment in the spotlight for crossing the finish line – but let’s not forget that whether you’re launching a $500M+ project or a shoestring budget title on Steam Early Access, launching a video game is hard.
One of the most common misconceptions in regards to video game development is that it’s all fun and games, and that all designers do is sit around and spitball ideas and press magic buttons that “make game happen.” I know that not all of you, or even most of you believe this, but it’s commonplace enough that it comes up on game forums, often when the person posting is angry about something.
In truth, every video game that goes into production is a herculean effort. Most of the games that you are playing today are born out of meetings for other games; features that a company wanted to include in game A, but didn’t have the time or resources to include because of deadlines, become the premise for game B. These ideas are iterated on, debated amongst the leads within the company, and ultimately the basic skeleton of a game is shaped: the genre, the time period, the focus (single-player or multiplayer, open-world or linear, etc.) are all decided, and then the project is presented to the rest of the company. Depending on the size of the company and who is calling the shots, designers and artists and programmers may be asked for their input.
At larger publishers, this isn’t always the case. But whatever the case may be, once it’s decided that this is the project we’re working on, that’s when the team gets to work.
And it becomes their lives for the next two, three, four-plus years.
When you sit down with a game designer and ask them what the most difficult part of their particular job is, you’re going to get a cavalcade of different responses. For some, it’s voicing their disapproval for a design decision they disagree with. For others, it’s working in a collaborative environment (or the opposite, working without anyone to bounce ideas off of). For me, the most difficult part of game development was and is staying at the very top of my game… pardon the pun… in and out every day. Creativity, while rewarding and fun and exciting, can also be taxing when you have the stresses of life knocking at your door.
However, when you ask a game designer what the most difficult part of being a game designer is, many of them will give you a single simple answer: time. When you launch a game on your PC, or PS4, or Xbox One, or Nintendo 3DS, you are experiencing years of work, the collective effort of people who have sacrificed time with their friends and families to see this game ship. Each and every game, from blockbusters like Destiny and Evolve, to mobile games like Tiny Tower Vegas, and even that sober acid trip Hatoful Boyfriend, are testaments to the people who made them.
Each game is a testament to the dedication it takes to stay the course. It’s a testament to a team or a studio’s ability to pool their talents together to create something unique. It’s a testament to the long hours and sleepless nights spent at the office during the “home stretch” of development, where the whole company stays late, often having the office equivalent of a giant pizza party as they stay at their desks until 4:00am bashing bugs before their “release candidate” is pushed out to distributors or disc printers. It is a testament to crossing the finish line.
For each game that you find on a store shelf, or on a Steam marketplace, there are countless others that didn’t make it; betas that were killed because of budget or time constraints, technical alphas that were scrapped or folded into other games, and concepts that never made it out of pre-production. These are the ideas that made it through the revisions, the rewrites, the design changes and build crashes. These are the games that developers believed in enough to push across the finish line, and even if it’s not their most prestigious or successful project, there is still a part of them that takes pride in the work it took to make their title a reality.
Even the bad ones. – and there are some bad ones, no doubt. Don’t think that because a game was released in an unpolished state that the design team is inept, or incompetent, or incapable. 99% of the time, that’s not the case. When you play a bad game, you are almost always experiencing the end result of something larger than a “bad designer.” You’re seeing an unfinished vision; half-baked ideas that had to be abandoned due to budget or personnel changes, but were too integral to the game to take out without blowing well past their publisher-set deadline. You’re playing the result of changes in design direction. Sometimes it’s nothing so dark; a game breaking bug that nobody bothered to fix because it had been there so long and the team had looked at the game so much that the workaround had become muscle memory, or a simple design idea that simply didn’t work but the team was too attached to it for far too long.
You can criticize these games; in fact, any designer worth their weight will welcome open and honest critique. All game designers want to improve, and all game designers want to make games that you and I and their peers enjoy. But when you take to the game’s official forums to scribe your 4,000-word thesis of flippant mockery towards the game, while incredibly tempting to do in the name of laughs (I’m guilty of this, it’s okay), remember – you’re not just making fun of the game, but also mocking the time and effort they put into it. You are saying, in a sense, that the sixteen-hour days and seven-day work weeks weren’t worth it.
So, congratulations to everybody at Bungie on crossing the finish line. Congratulations to everybody at Maxis on crossing the finish line with The Sims 4. Congratulations to everybody at Telltale Games, and EA Sports, and Red 5 Studios, and Carbine Studios, and Larian Studios, and Edge of Reality, and Nintendo, and Sony, and Microsoft, and everybody else who saw the fruits of their labors on store shelves (or virtual store shelves) in 2014. I know for some its a bittersweet affair (RIP Airtight Games), but seeing a game ship is hard as hell – and you pulled it off.
Be proud.