No, not a product redesign, but a website redesign.

There is a reason I did not post to inverse last week, I was neck deep in redesigning the Verse: Tactics web site. One afternoon I was sitting at work looking at it and thinking 'my goodness this is a boring website.' So, I started to think about fun ways to deal with a product web presence.

Travis and I have been fans of Alternative Reality Gaming ( ARG ) ever since the ilovebees campaign for Halo. We really wanted to do something in the ARG genre for promoting our company, but I was worried about costs ( time and money ) and shelved the idea.

Enter an interesting question from a friend of mine over at games.internode.on.net. She asked me which comes first for us as a company, our economic models or story. The answer was, and is, and always will be: story. Without story, you don't have a product to wrap your economic model around. All you have is Secondlife or Facebook. As cool as those products are, they are not why we founded a game company. Story is.

So there I was, really unhappy with our product website, really wanting to do ARG marketing, and having someone asking about storytelling and our company. All of this mingled together and I pushed out a redesign of the Verse: Tactics website. I took the entire notion of a product website and re-wrapped it in story. Rather than just list the product, and list off features, and show some concept art, the new V:Tac website treats Verse: Tactics as if it were a product from the game world we are building.

Then I took it a step further, and created a character. His name is Daniel S. Yoshida, and he's just about to go off to war. He is excited. He is motivated. He is trained, and ready to make some of the hardest choices he will ever have to make. And his life is about to unfold for all to read on his datalog. His story, from within the Verse game world, as told by him, through his letters and writings.

It should be fun, and I look forward to seeing where his life takes him.

We recently presented at Twiistup, which is a local networking event sponsored by a few large companies, and friends. There was a disappointing lack of "money" in the room... I believe all of 3 VC's we're present. But the people there, especially our fellow presenters, we're of the highest caliber. I'm really excited about the old friends that I saw there, and the new ones that I made, because they are some incredibly smart, talented, and driven entrepreneurs and geeks that I'm anxious to just hang out or play poker with. Special thanks to Mike Macadaan and Ryan Buckholtz for making it happen, and to all the presenters and smart people who made the event worth while, because it was a blast.

Here's a picture of our display:

As you can see we were showing off some concept art and technology demos. Here's the photostream for the event.

All in all a really fantastic team and network building experience and I can't wait to do another like it.

So, we have been getting hit with a lot of spam comments. Also, a pile of trackback's that are utter garbage. How so many people can be selling generic viagra is beyond me. To combat these evils I jacked up our Junk filter's sensitivity.

In response, it flagged everyone's comments as junk. Even mine!

So, I've toned it down. It means your comments should now be seen. I may have lost some of them in the midst of solicitations for pornography and drugs, but I got most of them. Sorry about the confusion.

Anyone have a good plug-in for blocking spam on a blog?

So this is my first attempt at being part of Blogs of the Round Table, so bare with me if I step on toes, swing elbows, and break some rules that I did not take the time to read. Welcome to the back of the classroom...

The topic this month poses the question: How crucial to game play are goals?

Ultimately, goals are at the heart of game play. Whether you are carefully guiding the player through a story, set of actions, or simple levels, goals are a critical part of the gaming experience. Goals are fundamental, they are as crucial to game play and the gaming experience as oxygen to mammals.

I am willing to go a step further, if your game has no room for goals you do not have a game at all. You have a toy at best, more likely you have a slag-heap of code and art assets. Ultimately, any action taken by the player or developer is goal oriented.

Like all good things in the metaverse there are two extremes a developer can take when it comes to goals: no goals or all goals. In the topic for this month they are described, basically, as 'Sandbox' or 'Fixed', or to make a far more meaningful parallel, Grand Theft Auto Random Acts of Violence or World of Warcraft Grinding You to Death.

One of the most important things we do as game developers is tell stories. Story telling is where the rubber meets the pavement for most games, and being effective at telling a story is a very real and pressing challenge for most game developers.

The crew over at PJ's Attic have taken some time to write out a fantastic whitepaper that explores the nature of story telling in games. The paper discusses not only the nature of telling stories through an interactive medium, but also goes into a good level of detail on the mechanics of the story teller and their relationship to the story participant.

It is a good read, not to heady, and certainly not dry like so very many whitepapers. If you are interested in story telling in games, definitely check out Games and Storytelling: A Working Definition of Storytelling That Encompasses New Media.

So, the last few weeks have been a flurry of hiring, coding, and technology exploration.

Our software engineers have recently doubled from one to two. Chad Hill is our newest team member, and has been working with us since May 7th. Chad, Travis, and myself have known each other for around five years or so, and have worked on Sindome together for a good chunk of that time. So, a belated welcome to Chad.

Right as Chad was joining our team we were in the middle of digging into our technology choices. Originally we were planning on using the Torque Game Engine for V:Tac. We quickly started to find out there were going to be some serious issues and challenges with Torque. So, being the adaptive creatures and agile development poster-children we are, we just went out and evaluated a few more potentials.

After looking at around a dozen potential solutions we ended up deciding that nobody was making a game engine or game development platform that would meet our needs and our budget. We could get, at best, 70% of what we needed at a cost that kills our budget, or we could get 20% of what we need, with a pile of stuff we don't.

So in the end we made a decision to build our own game engine around the Ogre 3D rendering engine. It means more work up front, but we are also saving ourselves a lot of baggage and kludge code that was coming with other game development solutions.

Things are going much faster than we expected in fact, building the code and architecture from the get go seems to be the more efficient route to have gone, which honestly surprised me. It helps when you have two incredibly talented and motivated programmers on your team. I also must send a huge thanks out to the fellow who helped us build our demo for Twiistup. Cheers man, your anonymity forbids me from naming you, but you helped us pull of a good showing.

I just watched a fantastic interview with Peter Molyneux from Lionhead Studios. I've been a big fan of his work for a long time (I spent many hours on a 286/12mhz playing Populous with a two button mouse), and it was neat to see him talk about his new work and the direction of his company.

At the end of the interview, he talked about Lionhead Studio's Mission: "Firstly, what’s Lionhead stand for? Innovation. Innovation. Innovation, and we more than ever before have said, we must make landmark games, we must make landmark, things that are landmark in the history of gaming, so you know that it’s gonna have innovation in it, and we’re going to strive further than ever."

And I thought to myself, "Imagine the pressure he's under, having to constantly innovate." and I wondered to myself what life would be like if every game designer was forced to innovate.

If Keiji Inafune had thought to himself, "No, I'm not going to make a side scrolling shooter with a guy who can jump because that's just Defender and Super Mario Bros.", would I have grown up playing Mega Man 1 though 20xd6?

You see it's our strong belief that the overwhelming power of our passionate and talented community will create a more rich, fulfilling, and innovative experience than our meager team could ever possibly aspire to, and that the best course for us is to build a framework that will allow us to leverage that opportunity.

That means a platform designed for constant refinement as the experience develops. For us, this refinement is our innovation: The idea that what we're building will be something that we never anticipated and no one has ever seen before is actually built into goals of the product, but the innovation doesn't have to come from us, leaving us free to NOT innovate in other areas, and focus on designing an experience that builds upon the successes of every other experience like it that has come before.

We're building a tactical command and space combat game, but the mechanics for that have been demonstrated in every other space shooter and RTS. I've played them all, and I can safely say we're not innovating in the department of space flight or dogfighting mechanics. You can expect a full fledged next-gen 3d experience, one simultaneously similar to every other space flight and dogfighting game (you're flying ships around in space and shooting weapons), and uniquiely it's own, but there's really no innovation here. Fast paced action and tons of fun, yes, but it's not going to change space flight dynamics in games forever.

Our games focus on social networking as well, but does this mean anything really innovative when compared to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or any other social networking site out there? To put it bluntly, no. Nothing we're doing in the "social networking features" space hasn't already been done before in one form or another. In fact we're going to rip the basic ideas off wholesale.

I wouldn't call what we're doing innovative. Actually I'd call it obvious, and inevitable. And if you saw a bunch of hungry people and you knew how to build a machine that would keep them fed for a long long time, you wouldn't call building it innovation either: You'd probably call it common sense.

Does that mean our game won't be original, or fun? Of course not. Taken as a whole it will be unlike anything you've ever seen before, because it's a completely original work. But it doesn't have to "change everything" to be entertaining, let alone be a huge success.

Does what we're doing "change everything"? A few people have suggested so, but we want to be more humble than that. In fact we have embraced the concept that what will come of our products on a larger scale is impossible to predict, and therefore we cannot take full credit for it because we will only be the catalyst. This is our model, and we embrace the humility of being the builders who make the swords, not the heroes who wield them and claim the prize of victory and glory. We reserve that right explicitly for our users, because it is they who will be doing the changing.

Now I've read a lot about how players don't have any idea how to make a game fun, and left to their own devices, will drive a game into the ground. And I've seen it happen. I've also seen the opposite happen, where the players are screaming for what they know would be fun, and no one will give it to them. I am not advocating design by community, and I well know the dangers (and potential benifits) of letting the inmates run the asylum, so please don't start in about Vanguard or SWG. Rest assured we will not be making those mistakes.

Perhaps the one area we are trying to be innovative in is finding... not just a healthy balance... but the zen of that inner-peace when your team, your product, and your community resonate in perfect harmony. This is our secret ingredient, one we've spent years refining, and will continue to do so. Refinement is our innovation.