Downtime

Well, this isn’t very good. Apologies to anyone who’s been reading the blog and fervently waiting nearly a year and a half for the next installment – things have been a bit hectic. Well, they were for a bit, but then they weren’t. Then they were again, and then they REALLY weren’t. But now they sort of are again. Or at least, they will be in a bit. In truth, I’m just pig lazy and am easily distracted from things. So apologies again. But I’m back, and with a few more anecdotes to churn out…

… The first of which I can tenuously tie in to what I was saying just then about things getting hectic. Since you last heard from me, I’ve seen 2 games released. After my first game just about reached its deadline last Easter (an expert in timing, I took 2 weeks of holiday when we were due to ship, expecting to come back and it be out the door… but it was still there, tenacious as ever, being bug-fixed), there was a bit of a lull while the designers from the project (myself included) geared up to jump onto another game that was being developed in tandem by a separate team within the company, due to launch later in the year. It was strange hitting such a dry patch after the frenzy of 15 hour days and lost weekends needed to get the first game out the door, as we were basically asked to familiarise ourselves with it. It wasn’t that long a period, though – before long management suddenly got wind of the fact that, hey, we don’t actually have that much time before this game needs to ship, and it’s in a bit of a state.

Enter us, newly familiarised and ready to make big lists of required changes, and go in with our scripting and editor skills from the previous game to whip this game into shape. It was only a couple of months before 15 hour days had returned, with their new friends, the days-when-you-spend-all-day-waiting-for-a-build-to-test-before-getting-it-an-hour-before-you-reach-your-daily-limit. Takeouts were consumed, facial hair was grown… I didn’t see my housemate for about a week at one point, such was my working pattern. But we got it done and out the door, even if it did seem to kick and scream every inch of the way out. 2 games on the shelves within the space of 6 months; very odd. (I’ll have to come back to what it was like seeing the fruits of our labours on the shelves another time.)

So after that, we’re all fairly knackered again. Days are short and feel weird, coming in and not really having anything to do. Coders and artists feel this transition less, as they have groundwork to do ready for the next games that we’re on course to do. We designers have our own version of that, namely some slight input on the high-end designs of these games. Mainly our boss and the higher-ups decide the fundamentals, but it was good to be involved – this was the first time I’d seen a game at the very start of development. This generally entails meetings where we’d look at the source material (oh yes, we’re back on licenses again!) and pull out relevant characters, what their abilities might be (sticking with any gameplay mechanics that have been established already), breaking it up into possible levels, etc… meetings which can be quite spaced out, leaving us in the interim to get familiar with the licenses – basically being paid to watch films and jot down ideas. Can’t really complain, but again it’s quite a shock to the system after the absolute shitstorm that is crunch time. And it makes it tricky to work a full day if your workplace does flexible hours!

After a good month or so of this, actual work tasks start to filter through. My fellow designers and I were asked by our lead which of the projects we would prefer to work on – unfortunately, some were more favourable than others for various reasons, including the licenses themselves and the teams that would be working on them etc. I personally chose to play martyr and opted for the project that most others weren’t touching with a 6 foot pole, which was a decision of dubious wisdom – but I’ll come back to that another time, as it’s a fun (cough) story. Early tasks for me included cobbling together lists of the characters, explaining their attributes within the game so that the team would have it for reference, that sort of thing… and then we’re pretty much back into writing level design documents. I can’t remember if I ever touched on this previously, but the document writing stage of design is so different in pace to the later implementation stage that it kinda feels like two separate jobs…

Which I suppose is my rather long-winded point. In a way I suppose it’s like how, say, a craft shop in a tourist town would probably see only one socks-and-sandal-camera-round-the-neck weirdo in the winter, but have to cope with an entire flock of the bastards during the summer months. No doubt lots of jobs have their busy periods and their quieter times. But to me, it seems as though while with the craft shop it’s just a case of the same thing but at different speeds, busy periods as a games designer doesn’t just involve churning out design documents at a mile a minute (which, by the way, can be either really easy or impossible – another topic I want to explore in full later). You have to be constantly ready to drop everything you knew and switch your routine, and not just swapping from ‘lethargic document writer mode’ to ‘turbo implementation Nazi mode’. Some days you’ll be asked to become QA for a day, Stars in their Eyes style, blitzing through the game so far and chasing up everything that appears wrong for whatever reason (usually looming milestones or shows requiring the game to be in a largely crash-free state). Others you become the sound effect bitch. I’m too lazy to find an analogy – something about football strategies, maybe…

And it can be tricky to adjust, especially to what I personally find the hardest change, which is going back to the plodding research and document writing after a mad flurry of implementation – i.e. when a game is finished. I can find it maddening when I don’t have practical tasks to be doing, and I have to go back to regular old thinking again. Or just watching a film for research, when you’re brain keeps telling you ‘this can’t be work, it’s too easy’ and distracts you from actually taking anything in.

So, downtime. It’s pretty boring, but it’s part of the job and pretty soon it becomes routine again. And then some bastard blows the whistle and all hell breaks loose again…