With Feeling (or ‘Let’s Get Some Freaking Enthusiasm For Our Project, Here’)

Chances are most people who aspire to work in the games industry will be dreaming of doing so with something innovative and exciting, like the next (and my mind went blank for several minutes here) Mario 64 or something. I honestly can’t think of that many games I’d class as innovative anymore. But anyway, people always expect or hope to be working on the games that matter, doing incredible new things.

We’re working on a licensed game. Most people with an ounce of gaming knowledge will generally run for the hills at the very mention of the term ‘licensed game’, whether it’s preceded by ‘film’, ‘cartoon’ or whatever. Licensed = ripped-off, badly implemented ideas, tedious and unimaginative levels… general badness. Right? Usually. I personally found Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom a guilty pleasure. No, hear me out. Sure it didn’t do anything new, but it was a solid platformer that had been made by people with obvious enthusiasm for the franchise; it was basically like playing through an episode of the cartoon, which is all its target audience can really want. And I love Spongebob, so a solid platform game with decent Spongebob jokes is fine in my books. So there you go. Plus, tongue surfing.

But I digress. Licenses don’t just elicit cries of despair from weary gamers, but also the developers commissioned to make them. After all, we’ve been given this game by the publisher. And it’s a pretty rubbish license. But it’s our job to be enthusiastic about it and create a decent game from the material, and from what I’ve seen this is one of the toughest things to do.

Before I joined, some of the team had worked on another licensed ‘gem’ before coming to this one. Meddling publishers made last-minute demands and changes that apparently fucked development right up, royally. They knew they’d made a below par game, and the name of the license is still a dirty word in the office. It’s a weird thing to come into, but I can’t imagine (yet) what it’s like; these people work insane hours, and poured so many evenings and weekends into this title that they knew some time before it was finished wouldn’t be any good. Sure they got paid their overtime, but even then, it’s never fun to feel like you’ve wasted your time.

So now they’ve been burned and seem to look at this new license with disdain. So far the publishers seem to have been fairly happy with us (from what I’ve seen, anyway), but who knows when they could start sticking their oar in and messing things up? But from what I gather this is a general problem for games developers, regardless of whether the game is a license or not. If there’s an external publisher, they call the shots, and that can mean hell for us. Apparently. I’m just relaying what I’ve been told.

What I CAN say for certain though is one curse of the license, which may be on a smaller scale but, if you ask me, still has an effect. Everybody thinks the license we’re working on is shit. It’s a kid’s thing, for a start. And I agree. I bloody hate it. But when, as I’ve said before, it’s your job to be enthusiastic about it and make a good game of it, it’s made tougher when no one around you is making an effort to disguise their contempt. Fair enough, we’d all rather be working on something else. But personally, I can put my mind to trying to make the best of it and keeping my personal hatred for the damn thing to myself. It makes a cheerier work environment. Being reminded constantly how bent your project is just makes it feel pointless. Like, “oh sod it, nobody cares how it’ll play as long as all the characters are there and we use some original clips and soundbites”. I can only assume this was the design philosophy behind every Simpsons game ever created, among others.

We’ve got a good few months to go on this. It’s not a serious issue, but I hope that this sort of negativity will fall by the wayside when everyone starts getting busier, just ‘cos then I’ll forget that I’m making something that I personally wouldn’t touch with a six-inch pole if it’d been made by anyone else.

Thinking about it, it sort of makes me look at all licenses in a new light. Sure, they’re generally little more than cash cows, but somebody had to make them, and chances are it wasn’t the person who decided that said license would be a good little money tree. They’ll have just sat in their cushy publisher chair and given the work to an unsuspecting developer who leapt at the chance to make some money in what is – and even I know this – a pretty vicious industry for anything that isn’t a brand.

I’ve decided. I know it’s not entirely up to me, but I’m going to do what I can to make our licensed game something that won’t just sell well and look pretty in the box next to the accompanying DVD, but will actually give the poor sap a good few hours of entertainment. It’s never going to be Mario 64, but if it can be another Battle for Bikini Bottom then I’ll be perfectly happy.