Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

It’s fair to say that the pressure of building games alone is enough to drive any normal
person loopy. Jump around from development fire to fire for long enough and you
will start taking crystal healing and weird ancient religions very seriously. You’ll
wonder why you never built puppets as a hobby. You’ll find yourself going to your
dentist just to sit in front of the fish tank. You will get angered when people leave
your office before you’ve finished your lecture on what a certain episode of Felix the
Cat is really trying to communicate about capitalism, Dostoyevsky, and the social
fabric. You won’t question drinking strange pieces of chemistry shoved in front of
you by those around you. Part of it all results from a pure state of sleep deprivation
paralysis.
Here are couple simple stories I can share with you. Being a game developer sometimes
feels like trying to find an electrical outlet in the dark using only your wet fingers
to guide you.
Think Fish
C H A P T E R 1 0
Our team was working on a fishing game during the height of the 1994 Malibu, California
firestorms. One day I was burning EPROMs for a Sega Genesis game in my office
when I heard a muffled wailing coming from somewhere down the hall. I
investigated. As I got closer the sound changed to a tortured kind of shouting now
coming out in bursts of whining and garbled profanities. Our offices were in the hills,
so some kind of animal making these noises wasn’t out of the question … although I
decided pretty quickly for myself that this raccoon can cuss like my Uncle Burt. As I
arrived at the sound source, I realized that it wasn’t a trapped animal at all; it was a
collapsed programmer. I would soon learn that collapsed programmers are just as
snarly and frothy as trapped animals. If we were in a pool at the YMCA, he would
have tried to drown me. “Holy cripe, what’s the matter?” I asked him. “I’m dying” he
lipped and muttered to me from his green puffy face as he flopped into a fetal position.
Well, shoot. I calmly panicked. I rushed to find the office manager—too many
Ding Dongs eaten to prop myself up at 3 A.M. while wrapping up a game build had
somewhat diminished my “rushing” ability. I try to go to the gym more now. We
called 911. The 911 dispatcher said, “All emergency personnel are busy fighting the
firestorms, sir.” I took a quick breath and said something like: “Look, if our programmer
dies we can’t finish our game and we’re already late on several milestones. I
don’t think he commented the code very well either. At some point someone mentioned
spaghetti and it wasn’t dinner time. Please get someone out here! He’s getting
more green while I speak with you.” The dispatcher assured me that emergency personnel
would respond as soon as they could pull back from the firestorm lines.
I gathered a couple of team members and we ran around the office to see if anyone
had dropped out of medical school to become a texture artist. Maybe someone had
studied the symptomology of turning green. Not one. Surprised?
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Getting Started in Game Development