Jeff On Games

Last weekend, I took part in the Global Game Jam, like I did last year and let me say it was just as fun, if not MORE fun this year than last. Our game, Quest for Stick, was really, really awesome this year, and you can learn more about it from the GGJ page and from our Twitter account. We even have a video of a complete play through of the game. The game is super pretty, only a little bit buggy, and generally I think accomplished everything we wanted.

But this year I went in knowing what to expect. How'd I do this year? What did I learn?

What Went Right

1. The Team. Last year, I said one of the things that went right was having a team. This year, that was even more so. We had a total of 7 people working full time on the game, which, initially, I thought was way too many. So much so that I actually asked people to leave the team and considered leaving the team myself to reduce the number of people. But, when it came down to it, I decided I wanted to work on the game idea and went with the other 6 people to create the game. Honestly, 7 people may still have been too many, as communication and tasking did get hard near the end of the project, but there's no way the game would have been anything near what it was if we didn't have at least that many people. Everyone was basically tasked the whole time, and the game came out great because of it.
   
2. Getting Down To Business: We spent very little time talking design this time, which worked out to our advantage. Although we spent a lot of time later arguing about how exactly the game was going to play, it didn't take away from everyone working, which was good. We got down to making something playable quickly, and didn't try to design too much stuff up front.
   
3. Tools choice: Last year, I was super happy with XNA. This year, the team used AngelXNA, even though I was the only one familiar at all with it, and I was the really the only one well versed in XNA. Even though I spent a lot of time helping people understand Angel / XNA, it was still, by far, better than attempting to use only XNA. It performed a lot of the heavy lifting for us in terms of doing animations, placing and managing actors, and, surprisingly, editing levels, though this is its own bullet point.
   

What Went Wrong

1. Unclear tasking: Occasionally, we got duplicated work or weird moments of down time because, like most game jams, people just shouted out things they needed. Kate was really the only person keeping track of most of these tasks, and really only for herself. For the artists, no one was really in charge of knowing what art was still needed and who was doing what. For a team this large, what we needed to create and consult a list on a whiteboard or cork board that had any asset requests, who was potentially doing them, what was in progress and what was up for grabs. This would have avoided duplicated work and would have given us an idea of how much work was left.
2. Late Playable: Despite my work to prevent this (more on this later), we still didn't end up with an actual playable game until mid day on the last day. Just having *SOMETHING* sometime on Saturday to hand to the artists and designers to make levels on would have helped. We did have lots of pieces that worked, essentially, but didn't get them integrated together fast enough.
3. Encapsulation problems: We had three programmers working together on individual parts of the game, which helped not only keep them tasked without stomping on each other, but made it so people were in charge of very small systems. However, some of the systems were weirdly encapsulated, and required copying and pasting over when we actually got to the point of integrating. Though this actually ended up *helping* at the very end, I would have liked fewer instances where I had to copy and paste the code from one class to another in order to integrate a new system into the main game.

What Didn't Work

So, these things really didn't go wrong, but they were things I was hoping would help us during the jam, but didn't.

1. The Simple CI: Before the Jam, I wrote a simple python script that would query a mercurial repository, pull down new code, build it, copy it up to a network location, then message everyone over gchat. This was awesome in theory, but not so much in practice for a few reasons. First, it didn't work so well. If anyone was signed out of gchat when it went to message them, the CI would get stuck in an endless loop. Second, the network drive would occasionally flake out and not be able to take the new build. Third, we didn't have anything the team could play until Sunday, so the CI ended up being useless until then.
   
2. The Angel Editor: The editor in Angel was an awesome idea, but when we got to the Jam, it was buggy and untested. It didn't save out things correctly, crashed, spawned items in weird places, and didn't work at all with our custom actors. In addition, the editor saved all levels out to the build directory, which was great for everyone but the people who were using it. Besides fixing the other editor bugs, in the future, the editor will probably need to detect whether a debugger is attached, and figure out where to put the levels from there, or create a custom levels folder that can be easily moved back and forth and through to an integratable build.
   

All and all, an awesome Jam. Please play Quest for Stick, and let me know what you think. I'm super proud of it.

I've complained about Game Informer before. As "the world's #1 video game magazine" it leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly I think it's just catering to its audience though, so frequently I just give it a pass.

Over the weekend, I read the latest issue of Game Informer and the following letter caught my eye:

I'm writing about your interview with David Cage in issue 198. He stated that video games are unable to generate an emotional experience like those present in movies, and I have to disagree. I feel that video games can offer even more of an experience than movies because of the opportunity to fill the shoes of the lead character.

The letter goes on, but that's the important part. Now, I don't agree with David Cage, but I don't agree with the writer of this letter either. I hear the "fill the shoes" / "you are the main character" argument concerning games and emotion a lot, and before I give my opinion on the subject, I want to ask these questions:

1. When was the last time you actually felt like you were the main character in a game, or, that the main character was you? And…
2. Can you name a time where you had a heightened emotional experience as a result of that feeling that could not have been achieved in any other medium?

I'd like to hear responses on this before I give my own.

I didn't do this last year. I don't know why. I probably wasn't in a reflective mood last year. This year, I've been in a very reflective mood, as you can probably tell from many of my blog posts over the year. I reflected on a lot of things: open standards and web identity, DLC, the possibility of being an indie game developer, and the state of computer science education. Until August, I was even able to post about twice a month, which is pretty good for me.

Besides blogging, what did I do in 2009?

• Me and several other Tools SIG members launched of the Toolsmiths blog, which is going very well, though we have dropped off a bit. Hopefully we'll be able to pick up again in the New Year.
• I participated in the Global Game Jam, which was a blast, and I'm sure will be a blast again this year. I've made plans already to make this a rockin Jam, and get everyone as coordinated as possible right out of the starting gate. We'll see how that goes.
• Darren and I also created AngelXNA, which I've been using and enjoying, and hopefully improving for this year's Global Game Jam. (More on that in another blog post).
• I learned to love distributed version control, a trend that I'm sure will continue.

So what didn't I do in 2009 that I really wanted to get done? The main one is that I didn't finish a game. I've got three currently on my plate, two of which are mostly coded one of which is still in prototype, but nothing finished. This is really frustrating for me for a few reasons. First, the longer I wait to release, the harder it will be to stand out, especially on services like XBLIG. Second, like most people, I entered the game industry to create games, but I've yet to see an actual design of my own make it to a finished, polished state, only ever to a useable prototype. I know this is true for many people, but considering my background I should be able to finish a game. I am going to try very hard to correct this this year.

What do I think is coming in the New Year and new decade? Hopefully you'll see my first game. For more serious predictions, I think you could do worse than listening to Joe Ludwig.

I think that we'll also see more trends towards user created content and personalization, to the point where I think you will actually, eventually, see a game come out on a console that will allow user created mods. The groundwork for this is already being laid out by the Rock Band Network, although it's still a long way from there to a console mod community.

Here's to a new year, new adventures, and hopefully some new games!

My good friend and educator Bill Crosbie is asking some tough questions on Twitter, specifically about what to teach fledgling game programmers to make them the most marketable to game companies when they graduate. Now, you might not be able to tell from the Twitter conversations, but Bill is actually very concerned about giving his students a good, foundations based, computer science education, while also giving them the opportunity to make games, and giving them skills that they can immediately transfer into the workplace, all in less than the two years he happens to have them. And what he's asking are actually really hard questions, and got me thinking: What would I want out of programmers coming out of two year and four year programs, both those that are focused on game development, and those that aren't? What can I tell Bill to do to make sure that I would at least consider hiring his better students?

The Never Ending Conflict

This comes down to a never ending conflict that educators are well aware of: the conflict between giving a student marketable skills, teaching them the tools and technologies that are relevant "right now" that they can put on a resume and will immediately generate hits on job search websites, and giving them an actual solid education in computer science and software engineering. Ask most programmers in the game industry (at least the ones I know) and they will tell you the later is more important, but look at who actually gets hired and the former plays a very obvious role. The problem is that when I'm hiring a programmer, I want someone who's smart and gets things done, but I also don't want to take the time to teach them all of the skills that they're going to use on a daily basis. It's a tough balance, and getting programmers that don't understand things about your core technologies, or at least their underlying principles, can be dangerous.

In addition, technologies go out of date so fast that teaching one specifically can be counterproductive. C++ has been the de facto standard in the game industry almost since inception, as we've needed the control and power that C++ provides, but the technology that we're working with under the hood can dictate exactly how we can use C++. Students taught to think about single threads of execution on x86 processors, using primitives that would be perfectly fine in other industries (like stl vectors and strings) would be screwed in today's game industry, an industry which is (now) all about squeezing as much performance as possible out of multiprocessor, multicore systems on x86, x64, PPC and Cell chipsets. And interestingly, this is exactly what's happened. Students taught to think ONLY in an object oriented paradigm have trouble parallelizing their code and thinking in terms of small executable chunks that don't suffer from things like race conditions and cache misses, if they even know what those are.

But what's academia to do? Most game developers won't even look at a programmer unless they have C++ experience, understand OO concepts, have done at least some work in DirectX, OpenGL, or Win32 programming, and has as a significant portfolio of work. This leaves professors looking to help game industry hopefuls little time to discuss things that are essential to computer scientists, like the benefits and pitfalls of functional languages, strong and weak typing, lazy evaluation, early and late binding, combinatorics, state machines and automata theory, synchronization patterns (semaphores versus critical sections), common concurrency issues and how to avoid them, and even compiler and virtual machine theory. Even if they get through all that theory, how many schools will be able to talk about the inner workings of modern chipsets, cache coherency, synchronization primitives, compiler intrinsics, and virtual memory? If you're a recent college graduate that can actually give me a definition on all of those terms, explain how they're relevant to modern computer software and game programming, and has a fundamental understanding of any modern game API, you're way better than I was when I graduated, and maybe better than I am now because I'm not sure even I could do it. And I can't tell you how much of it is important to know when you graduate, and how much you can learn either on the job, or on your own. Even the IGDA curriculum framework lists so much stuff that it would be almost impossible to push through in a 2 or even 4 year program. You have to pick and choose.

So if I can't figure it out, what's an educator supposed to do? Take a best guess I suppose. Fundamentally, though, I think they need to teach what colleges and universities have said they're teaching for years.

Teaching How To Think, How To Learn, and How To Work With The Tools

Most liberal arts colleges and universities still say they teach their students how to think. They're not necessarily teaching skills, and I like that. That's what I want from my programmers: I want them to know how to think, and, more importantly, how to learn. But there's nothing that says that this must all be done with theory, or that it should be done purely with theory. In my mind, the problem is that Computer Science and Computer Game Programming programs come out of science and math programs, and follow their pattern for how to structure classes: either 3 credit classes with focused homework assignments with little to no cross class application, or 4 credit labs where a single lab is considered enough to create a program that demonstrates theory. This is not only not enough time, but it doesn't encourage long examinations of hard topics, it doesn't encourage learning by failure, and it doesn't encourage learning why it all works the way it does.

How many schools actually look to the art world for inspiration? In most art schools, you have 3 credit studio classes, which last actually 6 to 10 hours per week, have only 2 to 3 projects per semester, and are combined with classes on fundamentals that can help improve project work. I don't think I ever had a class structured this way during my computer science education. The closest I ever got was a Software Engineering class, which wasn't really about software engineering as much as software planning, which is completely different. But, for programmers, these project classes should not necessarily be introducing new technology. At least at the start, students should work from the base competencies of whatever the school was teaching the previous semester, and early project classes should expect failure (though not say this out right), and encourage students to spend several days at the end of projects to examine their work for flaws in their design and flaws in their process, not flaws in the final product. This is where we teach students how to learn, and how to find the problems in their own work: by screwing it up royally.

In addition, I feel that early theory classes should be kept separate from those that are teaching applications of programming, especially those that are focused on programming in specific languages. However, the two classes should be linked together and move in conjunction. Each class on algorithms and data structures should be paired with the class that teaches its specific application to the language they're working in, thereby teaching both programming and theory. This I think is the major failing of most CS programs. They teach programming, usually in a specific language, and expect the students to pick up theory on the way. In the worse cases, the students return later to have classes specifically on theory, which is sometimes a repeat of what they already learned, just presented as theory instead of a feature of the specific language. By making that clear separation of learning theory and learning practice in two separate but joined classes, your students should progress faster in both. It also creates a flow in teaching and a reason to move to languages as you progress. When theory classes are ready to introduce things like how memory works, caches, cache coherency, pointers, and the like, that's when you can move your classes on programming into teaching C++. As you learn concepts in functional languages, you can start teaching ML in programming classes. As they learn the theory, they can see how it was applied in the language they're learning.

Finally, by the end of any given program, students should be spending a majority of time in studio classes, working on projects that utilize everything they've learned with frequent review of architecture and progress from their professor. However, this should be supplemented with theory classes that go beyond what they'll need to use on simple projects, like topics in programming languages, lexer / parsers, and the ability to prove algorithms correct, and include seminars in currently relevant technology and concepts (guest speaker series are great for this).

Doesn't Answer The Question

Interestingly, I'm not sure if this actually answer's Bill's questions, but it gets a lot of thoughts off of my head. I actually had an entire set of semester plans that went with this post, but scrapped it when I realized I have absolutely no experience in that regard. I can tell you what I want, which is basically separate theory and practice classes joined at the hip in early stages, followed by advanced topics in CS and software engineering paired with Studio classes. But, for me to tell you exactly how those classes should be structured doesn't make any sense.

So hopefully, without answering the question, I've been at least a little helpful.

As I said in my last post, I'm looking at releasing an Xbox Live Indie Game in the next few months. Today, along with Darius, I started doing a little bit of math about indie game numbers, and it's gotten me wondering, can you actually support yourself, and a company, on indie games (indie, in this case, meaning a smallish team experimenting with interesting gameplay concepts and styles). Now, I understand that this whole post, since it deals more with money than passion, may end up alienating me from the indie community, but as a developer I want to see small experimental games flourish, and I want to see those people developing them do well for themselves. This post questions whether or not that's even possible under our current thoughts and models.

We've been seeing recently a number of small game companies really hitting a wall when it comes to funding. Introversion had a post on their blog about their money problems, and Mommy's Best, though still pushing ahead, made it clear that the number's on Weapon of Choice were not good. We've had rants from game players about alternative funding models and suggestions from Gabe Newell about public funding for games. What can we take from all of this? What can we do for funding models?

So this whole thing starts with one piece of information: How many copies of a single game does a developer need to sell per year in order to support themselves? Let's start at a base line of $40k per year for a single developer. This may sound like a lot for indie developers and, let's face it, it really is. But I will tell you it SHOULD be a pretty good base line number, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which include the fact that, in the US, as a single developer, you will be taxed on that both as a business and again as a person. Also take into account health insurance costs and the possibility of supporting any person other than yourself, and $40k starts to sound pretty slim.

Now we need to figure in loss to distributors. Let's ignore distributors with up front cost / approval process (XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare) because even developing for these services usually requires either an already proven game or proven team, and we're assuming neither. This leaves us with iPhone, PC (in various forms, we'll focus on two as you'll see shortly) and Xbox Live Indie Games. For each platform, you need to look at distribution numbers, likely price points, and gross income, meaning the income after your distributor (or whatever) has taken their fair share.

iPhone

Let's start with the newest (and, for all accounts, sexiest) guy on the block, the iPhone. Most apps on the iPhone sell for $.99 to $3, with Apple taking 30% off the top. In addition, selling on the iPhone is really all about staying new, staying fresh, and staying on top of the most popular list. In order to do that, you need to stay at the lower price points to encourage impulse buys. That means staying at around $.99 for as long as possible. Here are the numbers:

So at the pretty much standard rate of $1, a single developer needs to push 57 thousand copies of their game per year in order to support themselves, or push multiple applications which can come up to that number. With the number of iPhones on the market somewhere around 6 to 10 million, the question is, how many sales can you except? Mac Rumors reports 4 apps that easily hit almost a million sales, but what's the data like for games? And indie games at that? The most telling post probably comes from the developer of Dapple, who wrote a very long post on how much money he actually made on the product (summary, he has sold a total of about 500 copies). In addition, this post on the price of apps versus their popularity shows very few indie games in the list, Field Runners (essentially an App Store Launch Title) being the notable exception, and very little money being made. Is it possible to be an indie and loved on the App Store? Only indies who have accomplished this can tell you, but 57,000 copies is a really hard number to hit with something interesting or experimental.

Xbox Live Indie Games

So what about Xbox Live Indie Games. Their Gross To Dev numbers are actually exactly the same, though the $2 price point doesn't exist, and the highest amount you can charge is $5. That said, until recently $2.50 was the lowest you could charge, which required about 22,800 copies to be sold per year. Unfortunately, XBLIG sales figures came up very short for most developers. Total download rates are low, as Indie games were hard to find on the dashboard until recently, and good apps are very hard to find, so I believe most people have been ignoring the service entirely. Sales for most games topped at probably around 5,000 copies since launch, far from the required 22 thousand to support a single developer.

PC

Finally we come to PC. On PC, sales numbers small, but you can expect to be able to charge more, though more is expected of a finished product. Games average anywhere from $5 to $30, even from indie developers, and you'd think that, hosting it on your own or through Steam, you'd get more of the pie. Steam unfortunately doesn't publish their numbers, but PayPal does, and we can actually use them as a baseline. Now, we're assuming that you're looking to get above $40,000 here, so we're going to use their range for $10,000 to $100,000, which is 2.2% + .30 per transaction. Here's the numbers:

Looking at these numbers, it's almost obvious why most successful indie developers start on PC. Even with the PC market shrinking (this talk form GDC shows us that you can expect PC sales numbers in the hundreds of copies, thousands if you're lucky), you get to keep a lot more of your money, and the audience is self selecting. People interested in indie games tend to have PCs and may buy your game. (A note to pirates: Look at those numbers and see how much you're taking from that developer, and the numbers EACH DEVELOPER has to hit before even becoming profitable. That, more than anything, should make you think twice about piracy). Hitting these numbers is possible, but not probable. It's quite obvious, to me, from these numbers why most successful indie devs are one man shops, making fairly quick games. This model doesn't scale to multiple developers, and definitely not for multiple years.

Alternative Funding Models

So what about Gabe's suggestion? Running basically a "stock market" for games where you can invest in projects, get a game out of it, and possibly see a little bit from the net profits off of a game? So far, We've seen a commission system partially go out, and partially work, but what about Gabe's suggestion?

Let's assume that for these systems, we're talking about multi-developer, multi-year projects. Still talking indie, let's say 4 developers over a year and a half, which is pretty reasonable I think. This totals (not taking into account taxes, office space, servers, or anything else) $240,000 that needs to be raised over the course of a year and a half. Though this is potentially possible, we'd have to look at other concerns. If a person invest in this game with a promise of returns on the net profits (after other expenses / taxes), he needs to understand the risks involved. After all, if a game company never hits that $240,000 number, and can't survive long enough to complete the game, that money is lost. Attached to this, is the idea of due diligence. Each investor is now an INVESTOR in your game, and can have possible legal rights to it. If you just take the money and never finish the game, they might be able to sue you. What is there in place to protect both the investor and the investee if this happens?

Now, provided these legal fees could be worked out, how much of net profit would you be looking at loosing, and how much would you charge for each point of net profit? What would developers look to gain, and what would investors look to gain. This post is all about numbers, so here we go.

First, let's start with a game that sells about 20,000 copies at $20 each (we're assuming these are good games that have a following, otherwise they wouldn't have been funded in the first place), on PC using the numbers above. That totals $391,000 revenue on the game, and let's assume (for argument's sake) that we have $41,000 in expenses for the game (to make nice round numbers). That leaves us with $350k net. Assuming we split to always end up with getting the funding we need, here's what the graph looks like:

In general, that's pretty grim. Only in the 70% case do the investors come out just breaking even, and the developers have enough to fund half of their next game. Is it possible? Maybe. But is it worth it for the investors? How many times will an investor loose most of their money from games that aren't finished, or games that don't break 20 to 30 thousand copies before they just kind of give up investing? How much work is required of developers just to set up the legalities to make sure they don't get sued, and their investors don't get screwed?

Another funding model for indie devs is to keep titles relevant from year to year, keeping sales of the title up while you work on the next title, and into your third.  By keeping these games selling, you can start to see actual profits. However, this also means consistently releasing games year after year, and surviving until these games come out. This takes a lot of start up capital, or at least the ability or desire to eat ramen for years on end, with only the smallest chance of reward (from looking at these numbers anyway).

Conclusion

These numbers make it really obvious to me why most indie (and, in some cases non-indie) business models exist, and why they produce the games they produce. To be successful, you need to be in one of a few situations:

• A single developer that makes a good title (Petri, for example)
• A single or set of developers with short release cycles to keep multiple games relivant over short periods of time.  (Almost all iPhone developers).
• A developer that has an already popular game and is able to get on one of the more visible services  like XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare (That Game Company, the Behemoth, 2D boy, Number None)

This is why indie games experiment the way they do.  Shorten the dev cycle, concentrate on mechanics and prototypes, keep art resources and requirements low, release lots of games quickly.  I feel like there needs to be more available.  I'm sure there are indies out there that want to experiment with things that take longer dev cycles, (weird dynamics, involved dynamic art styles, or, god fobid, strange narative structure), but can't for survivability reasons, and that's a damn shame.

So my answer to everything here is, maybe there's not a good living to be made in indie games. Even with alternative money sources, it doesn't look like you can sustain a business, even of small number of developers, without competing for AAA numbers, which seems to have a quality bar that almost requires a AAA team. Obviously, the math for that is wrong somewhere, as we've seen it happen, but is it worth it for me (or anyone else) to attempt the struggle when the reward seems to be mostly just more struggle? Is there an answer I'm possibly missing? Is there money to be made in remaining truely independent, or even survivability?  And if there is, can it be done for more models than what we have now?

Microsoft today announced that they're changing the pricing model for community games. I both like and dislike this, and in some ways it does actually hurt me in the long term, but I'll get to that. The only thing I like about the new changes is that they've pushed the minimum price point down to $1. I know there are games and applications out there that wanted to charge less, so pushing things down seemed smart.

But there are many things I don't like about the changes.

First, I'm unhappy that they moved the $2.50 price point to $3.00. No one actually keeps track of the conversions, and 200 points was a nice round number that people understood. It meshed with XBLA's round number schemes. 240 points, even though it actually translates to slightly more money, won't have people buying because it's a psychologically weird number. 40 points translates to 50 cents, but psychologically it translates into something completely different. Seeing this weird number, potential buyers might actually do the conversion and think about the price. As a person developing a game that will rely on the impulse buy, I'm not happy about that. In addition, people buying community games will now be left with a weird 60 point remainder, which they won't really be able to do anything with, unless we see XBLA games selling for 460 points ($5.50) or single downloads for 60 points. It's just odd, and it will turn more people away than it will attract.

Second, I'm unhappy that they moved the 50 meg cap to $1, instead of keeping it at $2.50. I'd rather have a 25 meg cap on $1, and a 50 meg cap at $2.50, or a 50 meg cap on both. I've actually been working hard to keep our sizes down to below 50 meg because I wanted to hit the $2.50 price point. Now that it doesn't matter, maybe I won't bother, but it'll just make me more lazy about things like asset optimization, not improve the quality of the game in any way.

Third, why did they feel the need to get rid of the $10 price point? I know very few games are good enough currently to warrant the price, but that doesn't mean it will never happen! Why are 3 price points the magic number here? Why can't it be 4? Why why why?!

Anyway, this all hurts me because my Community Game is getting close to finished, and I'd planned to release it at the $2.50 price point to grab some people doing impulse buys. I feel the game is worth more than $1, but I'm not sure others will feel that way, which is where the predicament comes in. With $2.50 being the lowest price point, anyone playing the game could easily just dismiss the set price as the lowest available. Now they'll actually think about whether or not it should have been priced at $1 over $3, coupled with the fact that it will leave them with that 60 point remainder. All in all, I think if the game I'm working on had been released before this pricing structure change, it would have done better than after the change, and that's just a damn shame.

One of the most frequent questions I get from high school and college students, especially after they read my school article in GCG, is "What programming language should I learn?" Generally, I reply to this question privately over email, but I figure it's something that I should have written about a long time ago, so here it goes. The answer is… it depends.

Now, I'm sure everyone was thinking the answer would be C++, and for the most part, you're right. But you're thinking I get this question from ONLY programmers, and only programmers that are at the level where they'd be able to work with C++ and not get intensely frustrated. Certainly, all people looking to be programmers in the game industry MUST learn C++ and MUST learn it well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We should first look at the different type of people that ask this question and first ask them a key question: What do you want to be in the game industry? The answer to this isn't always a game programmer. Believe it or not, some artists ask this question, and I don't blame them. The more technical skills any artist has, the better they're going to be at their job. So, I've broken this down into three groups:

Programmers

If you want to be a programmer, and I mean a "real" programmer, and you're at least fairly comfortable with a computer, I recommend you start with C++. A lot of people are going to yell at me for this, because they think C++ is prohibitively hard to learn, that it's on its way out, that it will be taken over by more interpreted languages like Python or C# and that a programmer learning C++ is wasting his or her time. I don't buy it. Almost all AAA game companies still use C++ when it comes to systems level programming, and I don't see that changing any time soon. And even if I did, I'd still recommend C++. Why? Because you are always more comfortable in the language you start in, and C++, through its many idiosyncrasies (and, honestly, poor language design) forces you to think about things like memory management, simple optimizations, side effects, const variables, const methods, references, pointers and (as you get more and more advanced) things like v-tables, performance of virtual methods, memory layouts, and memory trashing. More modern languages do all they can to protect you against some of this stuff, but even they have weird performance pitfalls that, unless you have a sound basis in "close to the metal" programming, you won't fully understand and that you won't be able to optimize away.

In addition, many, many languages, are based off of C++ in some way shape or form. Regardless of whether they carry over any syntax or keywords, far too many languages are classified as "C-like" (including many scripting languages) for you to ignore it and think you'll be able to slide by without a full understanding of it.

That said, if you're in middle school or early high school, I will say there is no problem learning other languages that make your programming life easier, like VB, Python & PyGame, DarkBasic or C#. By the time you hit college, through, regardless of whether your school teaches it or not, you should be learning C++ on your own and some of the libraries that are used in game development with it (either OpenGL and / or DirectX, with a smattering of Win32, just for fun ).  Just be aware that if you're starting in a higher level language, that you may be forming some bad habits that may end up being hard to break.

Designers

Okay, so you want to be a designer. Join the club. Now, everyone wants to be a designer, and my advice for this was, not too long ago, think of something else to do. That is no longer the case. I now believe you can become a designer in the industry, just not the role some people think (aka, not the person who comes up with the idea for the game in the first place). Regardless, I won't go into detail about this in this article, suffice to say most designers should learn programming in some form. My recommendation is to learn the languages you will most likely use on a daily basis, and those are the languages that are used to automate tasks in Excel. This means VBA and VB.NET (and / or C#). You will be surprised just how powerful these languages are, and how much more effective you will become at working with Office after having learned them.

If you're really adventurous, you may also want to learn a scripting language like Lua or Python, and learn a game making framework like PyGame. Why? Well, cause, then you can make your own games pretty easily, and that's what you wanted in the first place right?

Artists

For your run of the mill artist, I say learn two languages: MaxScript (for obvious reasons) and Python. Unlike MaxScript, Python is actually used in other places than art, and is a more fully featured language. However, it's also integrated into most art tools, including Maya, so you waste no time by learning it. As a bonus, Python has PyGame, which means if you have even the slightest understanding of Python you can actually make your own games without programmer assistance. And if you can do that well, I hate you, as I have no art skills what so ever.

I also recommend that artists at least take a look at C#, as many game companies are starting to integrate C# into their tools pipeline, and a smart tools engineer will find ways to allow small C# "scripts" to be run on top of their tools (this is actually very easy to do, though it takes a bit of forethought in the tool's design, but I digress). Anyway, learning the language won't hurt you, and may help as C# becomes more common.

What about…

So, many people will read this and wonder what happened to their favorite tool or language. Flash and ActionScript in particular are missing, as are the scripting languages for tools like GameMaker. Well, in my mind these are specific tools, and if you want to use these tools (or you're forced to use these tools), then obviously you will have to learn their languages. The good part is that, as you learn programming languages, it becomes easier to pick up other programming languages, and the ones that I've mentioned as places to start are all languages that will give you a firm enough basis that you should be able to pick up other languages easily. I don't see the purpose of learning a specific language first. Their applications are so limited that their practicality is diminished.

So I hope that answers the question about what language you should learn. Hopefully this helps point some people in the right direction. Good luck everyone!

Gamasutra has an interview with VP of PR and Marketing for Bethesda Pete Hines about DLC. The article is pretty interesting (at least the DLC parts) and if you're at all interested in the subject I suggest taking a quick read. I wanted to make a few comments on it (as I'm interested in DLC models in games), but first I have to do a quick disclaimer first, so here it goes:

I am a former employee of Bethesda, but any comments I'm about to make do not reflect on the company's opinion of anything. I was never in any position to make any decisions about the design of their games, the business model of their DLCs or anything related to anything other than the lowest level system code. DO NOT ATTRIBUTE ANYTHING I SAY TO BETHESDA OR EVEN TO A FORMER BETHESDA EMPLOYEE PLEASE!!!

With that out of the way, I'd like to comment on Pete's stance on large expansions as DLC:

What we discovered was that we want to be able to do stuff that doesn't take a year to come out.

All these people are out there playing our game by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis and we want to be able to bring those folks something they could do in a much shorter time frame, rather than just saying, "See you next year." That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do.

I'm only partially with him on this one. I honestly think Oblivion got it right. Offer a wide gambit of stuff to get: small digestible chunks along with one (or two) big expansions. That way, you don't have to say "See you next year" and you still provide a big expansion, which increases the visibility of the game immensely (and encourages people to get more DLC). With the excellent design and art team they have at Bethesda, splitting the group into a set of small(er) DLCs and one large expansion just makes sense to me. It keeps the game fresh for those that are going to want things fast, but also increases the game's and DLC's profile when a giant expansion comes out.

I also think that there's one model that Bethesda isn't touching on, and I hope more companies think about as a future revenue model soon. That model is episodic DLC content; content that builds off of itself and is offered (say) once a month at a reasonable price point, then bundled together at the end. A game like Fallout or Oblivion (it seems to me) is the perfect place for something like this: a full game that's expanded over time with DLC. It strikes me as a better alternative to games like Gears, which were episodic, but at a full price point for each title, and on different disks. I think we're still placing too much emphasis on engine improvements when in some cases people just want to continue the game. Sure Gears 2 looked better, but couldn't they have released DLCs to continue the plot while working on the next engine in parallel?

Interestingly, it's been my prediction for a long time that more and more games will start looking towards DLC and episodic models to create games. This doesn't mean we'll see the end of "big blockbuster" games any time soon, but I think it will not only become more and more common to release things episodically, but almost an expectation of the audience. Already, you're starting to see games sell on the promise of DLC, or demands for DLC after a game ships (like Mass Effect). I think this is only going to become more common.

Right at the tail end of GDC, Microsoft released to developers the XNA Community Games sales figures. While many of the top sellers are keeping their data private (including Miner Dig Deep and the Masseuse products), many have released their data to Gamasutra, which has a very nice in depth discussion. The general consensus? Most developers are disappointed.

Now before I get into defending Microsoft and the XNA platform as a whole, let me say that the release of sales figures after GDC was certainly not a mistake. If sales had been going well, Microsoft would have done everything in its power to get those figures out either before or during GDC in order to bolster more developer support for the platform. As it is, they knew most developers would be disappointed with the figures, and thus waited until after GDC when the news would have the smallest impact. PR guys are smart like that. So trust me, Microsoft knew you'd be sad and is trying to cover up its mistakes on the platform.

Now I'm going to play the devil's advocate against the indies here (who I respect greatly), and just say that I think Microsoft is getting a bad wrap for poor sales figures. Most of the articles I'm seeing are about how Microsoft isn't promoting the platform, and how Microsoft isn't promoting their games, how Community Games are hard to find on the NXE (TRUE!!! I complained about this already!). No one's blaming themselves for the lack of good games on the system, which is relegating it to second class citizenship. No one is complaining about their own lack of marketing. In fact, some of the games that have pretty good sales figures (not great) are marketing themselves, and are seeing profits as a result. You can't expect Microsoft to do all of this for you, just because you're on their service that they provide you mostly for free. That said, even those with good marketing (like Weapon of Choice) aren't doing great, but at least it doesn't look like they're blaming Microsoft at all. They're just disappointed.

Of course, many are taking this opportunity to talk about how much better iPhone would be to develop for, but I can't stand these comparisons, mostly because the type of game that is going to sell well on the iPhone is going to be different from one that is going to sell well on a console. iPhone is all about the impulse buy. $1 for some small app that looks fun that I want to play right now because I'm bored on a bus, or that serves a need I have right now, but may never have in the future. If that's the game (or app) you're developing, you need to be on iPhone because your game isn't going to sell well on XBLCG anyway. Console sales just are not going to work that way, and you shouldn't expect them to. The amount of money, time, and polish that needs to go in to something that will be sold on a console is higher (IMO) than something sold on a mobile platform because it needs to capture the user's attention for longer. On iPhone you develop for a short attention span, and on XBLCG, you need to develop for the longer attention span. It's just necessary.

Lastly, I want to reiterate how Microsoft and Apple are the only people that are providing an open platform for development, and should be lauded for that alone. It seems both companies thought of the idea at the same time. The 1.0 refresh of XNA was released in April of 2007, a full year ahead of the iPhone SDK, and Microsoft announced Community games in February of 2008, a month ahead of Apple's SDK announcement (which included their app store announcement). However, Apple shipped first and with more features (including sales figures) starting in March of 2008, whereas the NXE (which included the CG store) launched in November of 2008, and didn't get sales figures until last week. In general, both companies deserve kudos for opening previously closed development platforms, and for giving the average person the opportunity to make money on the platforms, but when it comes down to it, they're still very different platforms with different concerns, and attempting to compare them (in my mind) is absolutely ludicrous, so much so that I won't even talk about the millions of features Microsoft HAS to offer in order to keep up with their own XDK technologies (including parental control) that Apple hasn't even touched on yet.

Really lastly, I have ideas on what really needs to happen for CG to really be a "quit your job" platform, but that will have to wait for another post.

I apologize for being quite silent on this blog recently. I've been super busy with work, personal projects, and my new blog, the Toolsmiths. In general, I'm super excited about the success of the Toolsmiths. We've been hit on reddit twice (with HUGE traffic spikes both times) and the comments have been generally excellent. I'm hoping that the momentum will continue straight into GDC, when I'll be hosting the Tools SIG roundtable to discuss the various ideas for the direction of the SIG in the coming year. The blog was a great start, and I think it has gotten people excited about the Tools SIG again by making it visible. Now we need to leverage that into community projects that can actually help the community.

As a side note, I can really only act on all of these plans if I'm elected Tools SIG chair. If you haven't voted yet, please remember to vote soon, as elections close on Friday.

In addition to the Toolsmiths, I've been working on some small side projects, including a port of Sort to XNA, and a port of Angel to XNA. I know a lot of people are interested in the Angel port, and so far it's coming along very nicely, though it does have a lot of differences from the original Angel (especially in the rendering department, obviously). Hopefully I'll have my first alpha for that available after GDC, but we shall see.