Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
While we waited for help, the collapsed programmer never stopped crying and
moaning, which proves that he’d probably never make it as a producer. In about
40 minutes, the doors to our office blasted open and some big, yellow, ash-laden,
tarred-up firemen sporting bright-red oxygen tanks burst in and we directed them
immediately to our green friend.
They loaded our green associate onto a stretcher and attached an IV and monitors.
As he was being wheeled out the front doors of our offices, the VP of product development
returned from lunch, and quite possibly from a round of golf or two. He
looked at our green programmer on the gurney, and then he looked at me (the producer
type) with his eyebrows raised into a “We’re not slipping the milestone, are
we?” posture. He looked back at the green programmer now mounted and ready for
stuffing and he simply said, “Think fish” while he patted a fireman on the oxygen
tank, the Morse code for “take him away, boys.”
End result: You may be dying, but that’s no excuse to stop thinking about the code
for the fishing game. My mouth dropped. Are we savages? We could have avoided
the whole mess if somebody had time to throw away old orange juice. Bad orange
stuff is what apparently turned him green.
Sacking Sanka
Around the offices of a game development studio, you regularly hear noises of all
kinds. You might hear sound effects or music loops being edited or composed. You
might hear artists having interesting conversations with their significant others. You will
hear many Coke cans opening. Anyone, at any moment, could be stuffed in a corner
or sleeping under a desk. Hygiene will be uniformly suspicious. You might even begin
to hear air leaking from the valve stem at the back of your head. Don’t worry. You are
not a beach toy, you just really need a vacation with one. When I reach this point, I
normally leave for the batting cages. Every game developer needs to know what to do
when the pressure gauge needle gets stuck in the little red quadrant. Watch your team
members carefully. If you see someone starting to melt, guide them to the refrigerator
to congeal them back together.
On one particular day there had been heated shouting matches going off all day
long between a certain programmer and another producer. Programmers have the
unenviable task of creating all the code assets to support a game. Producers have the unenviable
task of dealing with almost every single aspect of game development that a
programmer or artist doesn’t care to be bothered with. These collective “aspects”
will often fall and make for a messy floor, unless a good producer regularly mops up.
There is some friction between all developers by definition. Programmers can get
into an “I am the controller of code, my little minions, behold my deeds” mindset.
Producers can get into an “I understand this, and I want you to have time to make the
Star Trek convention this year, but we still have commercial obligations” mindset.