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Be forewarned, this is a rant, and not all that coherent…
I started EON, like really started making an actual game at TIGJam early in October. I had spent the week between Indiecade and TIGJam messing around with a copy of Asher Vollmer’s sweet particle-thing, but it was just messing around for the sake of learning to handle a lot of particles in flash. At TIGJam I had about 2.5 days to really take a particle-demo and turn it into a game, and by the end of TIGJam the game was finished, or at least feature complete. I had streams of particles, black holes, collision detection, a level editor, color blenders, pretty much all the components of the game, and I haven’t added any new gameplay elements in the past month. For all intents and purposes, the mechanics and rules of the game were fully programmed and finished in about 30 hours of work.
So, what the hell have I been doing for the past month?
UI, end game states, sound effects, music, save states, fixing mouse event bugs, a new cursor that changes over active objects, a timer, tooltips, a main menu that looks cool, an intro that looks cool and seamlessly shifts to the menu, intros and outros for each level, fading, a new color system to represent various shades of each major color, new procedural visual representations of black holes, gas giants, absorbers, the sun, the letters E and N, a new starfield, a lighting system for the main menu that I scrapped because of speed problems, memory leaks, performance optimizations… That’s about all I can think of at the moment, and that’s a lot of shit. And it takes a ton of time, and it’s totally boring as hell. I’m not in this game because I like programming UI, and I really really hate implementing tooltips, so why the hell couldn’t I just release the game that I spent 2.5 days on and make my money and move on?
All of this, of course, fits under the category of Polish, and from my experience, at the end of the day a player is going to like a well polished turd more than a really rough diamond. This is why Modern Warfare 2, much to the chagrin of the Phil Fish’s of the world, is going to sell a bajillion copies while Unfinished Swan is likely to sell a couple hundred thousand (which would still be awesome, but that’s beside the point). People want their experiences with their games to be smooth, easy to jump into and without any sharp corners, and I’m not standing on a pulpit looking down on the unwashed masses, I totally fall into this trap. The Thief series is one of my all time favorite set of games, I love everything about them, and a mod team has put together a really fine re-envisioning of the game for the Doom 3 engine. I know that I’ll love it and play it through in one sitting and rave about it online when it’s done, but I can’t force myself to figure out a bug that’s preventing me from playing. I spend about 10 minutes online searching for an answer and then get tired and move on, and this is coming from a die hard fanboy of such games! Really, it’s pathetic!
Honestly, I’m not sure what the point of this rant is because I still don’t see any way around having to polish the shit out of your game before letting people see it or pay you for it, it just sucks. The industry seems to be a lot more focused on releasing more and more polished games rather than innovating on gameplay, which makes sense from a business standpoint. It’s easy to see where there was clunky UI or where bad wall-hugging hurt player experience in Gears, it’s not so easy to see how people will react to a totally new game mechanic, especially when you remember that it’ll have to be polished up to the level the consumer expects. The cost of creating something new is so high at this point that it’s very very hard to justify.
This slow buildup on the expectation of polish is easy to track, try to play your favorite game from 10 years ago and see how your rose-colored glasses are shattered by how difficult the controls are, or how clunky the inventory system is. Going back to play X-COM is a real trial for me, and it gets worse as the years pass, even though I used to play it so much I dreamed in isometric.
The end result of this is that I’m realizing more and more that if the game prototype isn’t done within a few days, your polish period is going to stretch out in an exponential way. This makes it even more essential that you find the core of the experience quickly, and that you’re excited enough by it to see it to the end, because once the fun is over there’s a long road ahead. I’ve heard Chris Delay say that DEFCON was done in 24 hours, and they released it after a year of polish, there’s something very disturbing about that.
EON is 98% polished now, and people are starting to have fun with it, so that’s really rewarding. It’s probably the most polished thing we’ve put out, which is probably good for our bank accounts, and I still like the game a lot, which is good for my soul.
Maybe I’m just a crybaby and all I want to do are the fun bits of development. I probably am. I suppose I’m just asking all the other dev’s to comment here with a “Right on!” or “yea, polish sux!”
That would make me happy :)
COMMENTS
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13 Responses to “EON and POLISH”
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axcho
November 10th, 2009 at 4:01 PMRight on!
Being a perfectionist, polish is something that I don’t necessarily mind working on, but conceptually, I hate the idea of having to spend more time working on something that’s already done instead of making something new. I want to make games as fast as I can think of them!
Actually, I wonder if I would find it enjoyable to help other people polish their games. I am the kind of person who can spend hours tweaking a few numbers in a physics simulation to get the feel just right, and perhaps this is not as common among programmers as I might have assumed. And I like UI design, though it can be frustrating at times, especially with a poorly constructed codebase.
But hmm. Might this be a real need that I could fill. What do you think?
fucrate
November 10th, 2009 at 4:37 PMSee, that’s what teamwork should be all about! Find someone who loves doing all the things you hate doing, and just assembly-line the process or something. The problem, though, is I would spend a week on the prototype and then you would spend a month and a half polishing, which seems inequitable.
Also, then I’d get to do all the fun game-design stuff…
Polish
November 10th, 2009 at 5:17 PMWhat? You suck!
Your friend, Polish
Andy Moore
November 10th, 2009 at 9:00 PMAugh I hate polish and UIs!
I’d rather tell all my friends “hit spacebar to jump” than put up a helpscreen. I also wish my hand-drawn graphics were enough to convey the ideas, though… And we all know how much a good artist can help us out.
Normally I glance at my to-do list and see “Bug X, Y, and Z” and just sigh and go watch cat videos all day. Nothing tops that exhilerating “I’m making something new” feeling when you’re getting the game idea out; maybe it’s for the best that we temper it with long periods of boredom in between?
God at play
November 10th, 2009 at 9:46 PMI totally agree. The latest game I’ve been working on was made in a little over 24 hours, and so far I’ve spent another 40 hours doing mostly polish and UI stuff. ;_;
Maybe it’d be worthwhile to create some sort of GUI framework to reuse? At least for the main menu.
fucrate
November 11th, 2009 at 12:28 PMIt’s true, everyone points to cat videos as the reason work doesn’t get done, but in reality the cat videos are just a symptom. I don’t really like watching cat videos, I just don’t like bugfixing more, so the cat videos are the path of less resistance.
Colin northway
November 11th, 2009 at 2:55 PMYeah! Fuck polish! I join you in the rant. I’m gong to add more of that to my GDC thing.
But seriously. There is only one thing in EON you ever drop. Why do I have to drag it off the menu into the game? Why can’t I just click to drop it? You should polish that up a bit.
Michael H
November 11th, 2009 at 3:29 PMMike - this is great.
Seeing this from you, I can tell that you have really matured as a game developer to see the realities and obstacles that have to be overcome to make an amazing game experience for all. You have always had great game ideas, and I look forward to seeing the polished perfection you will be pumping out in the future.
Kriss
November 12th, 2009 at 3:18 AMPolish is necessary for “hype and release”, if hype is not your primary publishing weapon then less polish is possible.
If you actually own your own audience then polish can go right out the window. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it can.
axcho
November 17th, 2009 at 2:27 AM“See, that’s what teamwork should be all about! Find someone who loves doing all the things you hate doing, and just assembly-line the process or something. The problem, though, is I would spend a week on the prototype and then you would spend a month and a half polishing, which seems inequitable.”
Well, I could probably polish several games at the same time, which might fit my inclinations better anyway…
“Also, then I’d get to do all the fun game-design stuff…”
Well, small-scale design can be fun too. Usability and such. I tend to like the really high-level vague design and the really nit-picky polish design the most, and I can lose interest in the middle stages (i.e. level design).
I’d be up for trying out such an arrangement sometime if anyone’s interested, at least. Let me know. :)
Dustin M
November 19th, 2009 at 5:11 PMHey,
Love the topic because I’m currently burned out on the UI for my game. I’m known for biting off more then I can chew, and bad spelling. Yah, I’m a solo designer/developer with massive projects, but the one thing I’ve learned is that if you find a third party software (like the drag and drop game development tools) that when you start making your money, they will start demanding more for their service. I’ve seen third part software kill corporations in the past.
Therefore, my plan is to make a UI or two, and just plug my new games right into them …. or at least that the current plan. Hopefully I’ll get hired on by some company first.
Later,
Dustin McBeth, Owner
WolfCrown.com
hagarack
December 4th, 2009 at 2:50 PMI think that a certain amount of polish, in terms of good UI design is important to games. I think the real question is which part of the polish can actually add to the game and what parts are pointless lens-flaresque pieces of shine.
rosedragon
January 1st, 2010 at 8:56 PMI agree with the pain of polishing, but it is a must. Polish different the $$$ value of your game by 10x and even more.
Also I think it is not just about UI and bug weedings, it is a lot of stuffs. There are beta testing, make sure everything fits each others — even the volume of the music and sfxs matter! , what approach to move to next screen, fix some quirks in the art, make smoother animation, etc.
I hasn’t really found out all the polishes needed to make a game stand out. Kinda depressing that my 2 months game hotel catastrophe(which 1 month is polishing) doesn’t do well at all in the wild.