by the Prey Team (with some extra verbiage tossed in by Paul Schuytema)

com-mit-tee (ke-mit'e) n. 1: A group of people officially delegated to perform a function, as investigating, considering, reporting, or acting on a matter.

Paul Schuytema, project leader:

Yipes. That's a spooky word indeed. For us freewheelers in the game industry, the word "committee" seems to spark an irrational Pavlovian response--sweating necks, fear of The Suits, and, worst of all, meetings. Ask any knowledgeable game industry journalists what they think of "design by committee" games and they'll shudder, thinking of a muddy jumble of once-great ideas squashed under the wet blanket of democracy. Hell, talk to stellar individual designers in this industry and mention the words design and committee in the same sentence, and they'll start in a-lecturin', waxing poetic on how too many cooks spoil the artist's vision (to mix a metaphor).

OK, so let's take a different approach: game design, pure, wondrous game design, should flow from a single creative fount--the designer. Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Sounds like the job everyone would want to have, if you ask me. Sit in your office, shades drawn, Beethoven (or Skinny Puppy) blaring on your Bose office stereo, absentmindedly shooting Nerf hoops as your brilliant mind contemplates the wholeness of your great game design.

But let's look a little closer, shall we? In my opinion, the mystical quality that we associate with the über-designer, that elusive specter we call Creativity, is one of the most overrated of our great human attributes. Anyone can be creative--it's just not that hard. Coming up with a cool game idea is really a no-brainer.

The hard part isn't coming up with an idea, it's taking a burst of creativity and refining it and evaluating it and refining it some more, into something that actually works as a game design. It's a slow process that's tied to so many other processes, like technology, money, time, and whether or not it will actually be fun to play.

Flavoring the Recipe

We're taking an interesting design approach with Prey. Realistically, I think that our approach is most effective with a small team like ours (we only have a dozen developers on the project). Any larger, and the process gets unwieldy. In short, we all shoulder some of the design burden for Prey. Every developer is expected to contribute in a meaningful way to the design that is our game.

One of the key aspects of Prey's design can be attributed to our team's personality. By good planning (or just plain old good luck), we're a development team that holds to a central vision of our game. This makes my job a whole lot easier: by sharing a common vision, our design brainstorming always involves barking up the same tree. It's far easier to listen to and critique each other's ideas when we're all shooting toward the same goal.

One of the entities driving the Prey design is the game's story. Essentially, this is my domain, since fiction writing is my raison d'être. But again, it's not done in a vacuum. With Prey, we're diverging from the 3D Realms way by crafting the story on the front end. It's essential, since we want this game to play more like a science fiction novel than a typical shoot-'em-up. Story is the first thing that I started working on, even before my family and I moved down to Texas--once I got here and listened to Scott and George's ideas about the game, I did a major revision to get to the basic story-form that we have now. But over the months, as we've had design meetings and brainstorm sessions, a good handful of ideas have percolated out of the team that I had never considered. These were also folded into the story mix.

The story and the game design are like two of the three thick cords in the braid that is Prey (technology is the third). They are interrelated, but not the same thing. The story has been evolving along dramatically and thematically, but the instances of plot (the moments of gameplay) will evolve not out of my sterile musings, but out of the dynamic imaginations of the gamespace engineers (the artists formerly known as Mappers). At this moment, the story is akin to a Christmas tree that is solid in its stand and has lights already strung on it, but lacks ornaments. While dramatically solid and populated with characters, desires, motivations, and conflicts, it lacks the points of dynamic plot. We'll get into story-forming and story-encoding in a later journal, but I wanted to lay it out as one of the primary organizing threads of our communal design process.

The other organizing thread is what I call the "emotional feeding" of the player. We all have a very clear idea of what types of feelings we want the player to experience during the game. One of the first approaches we took when beginning the team design process was to get a very good handle on the end results we wanted to achieve for the player. We spent a good deal of time exploring the "grain" of the Prey experience. What emotions are key? What sensibilities do we want to challenge? How do we envision the player's physiology reacting to the play experience? These questions allow us to formulate foundational design goals from the outset. I think we can all imagine, if we close our eyes and think carefully, just what we want the Prey experience to be like. It's easy, then, for us to sift out those approaches that don't have the potential to deliver these types of feeling to the player.

One of my most vital job responsibilities as project leader is to be the "s--- filter." With so many ideas coming from many divergent backgrounds, I need to be able to quickly and accurately assess the value of any idea. I also need to be able to listen very carefully, especially when an idea seems like it just won't fly. Why? Because I want to know just what's behind it. By listening, and pursuing a productive dialog, I can often unearth the effect, emotion, or play experience that a particular idea is intended to invoke. With that nailed down, we can look at some different approaches to accomplish the same goal, but which might fit better within the vision of the game.

Stylin' on Stumpy

Here's an example of our design process in action:

Initially, we set down rough guidelines for the enemies that we wanted in the game--this evolved out of the number of creatures that we thought reasonable. We compartmentalized them into the fictional hierarchy and then crafted rough, one-sentence descriptions of the beasts. One of Allen's early tasks was to give us a set of initial sketches from those deliberately rough descriptions. He provided several dozen sketches and we all reviewed them--some were obviously cool while others just didn't fly at all. Meanwhile, while we were reviewing the sketches, Allen had some free time to do some imaginative modeling. One creature he came up with on his own immediately earned the nickname Stumpy, the lizardlike creature that you saw in last month's column.

"Stumpy's design was very spontaneous," Allen remembers. "My brain was fried from an onslaught of polygons and I started to doodle. After one two-inch messy lump of lines in the corner of a page, I had all I needed to go ahead and model it. The model itself went through two versions (where I had to lower the polys--auuugh!)."

During one of our regular design meetings (everyone on the team who wants to can attend and offer input), we selected Stumpy as a character to discuss. Allen told us what he imagined about the creature (his size, behavior, weapons, and so on), and we all tossed this around a bit to see if we could fit it within the plot of the game. It was pretty clear, almost immediately, that he would fit in quite well, so we started to talk about behavior. After about an hour of brainstorming, we had a very clear picture of this creature's existence within Prey.

That brainstorming session gave us enough fuel for Allen and me to sit down and come up with a list of needed animations for the character. While Allen was busy animating, I was able to craft the game-specific design (what gets handed over to the coders for implementation) based on my notes of the design meeting. And then, in one more impromptu session, as we were reviewing Allen's animations, we came up with the anthropological background for the entity, which made him fit even better into the fictional scope of the game.

One of my jobs is to act as the scribe for the great ideas we come up with--to document and refine them. We have a communal folder in our team SourceSafe directory that holds all of our running ideas in document form, easily accessible by the whole team. In fact, we've got a "Rockful Ideas" text document that is the primary place to jot down moments of gestalt and inspiration.

A pic is missing here.

The Natives Speak

Here's what the rest of the design team thinks about the process:

Scott McCabe, 2D artist:

I think that we all pay attention to other games that come out, in a listen-and-learn kind of way. This is good; we all seem to like breaking down the latest and greatest titles, and analyzing them. It's great that we can all be objective and take a neutral stance, or even better yet, think of other game ideas--and our own--from the player's point of view.

William Scarboro, programmer:

Our approach to design is one in which everyone contributes, a kind of informal democracy. Everyone is responsible for the coolness of the game, and everyone matters...everyone just needs to recognize that in such a free system, you must assert yourself and fight for your ideas.

There are ample opportunities to explore our own ideas; but you can't lose sight of the end goal--the game--and you must be careful not to get so caught up in your specific tasks that you fail to set aside time to contribute to the idea flow. It's like life, you know: you must walk a fine line between individuation and relation.

Matt Wood, gamespace engineer:

It's great that every team member's thoughts count. I've heard horror stories about companies where The Big Cheese comes up with the idea and the underlings do the work. I couldn't have more of a problem with that. Here, if you have an idea, you yell it out and if the rest think it sucks they'll tell you. But everything gets considered. There's no REAL boss here.

Conversely, it's hard to get everyone to agree on something at the same time. I consider this a fairly small team, but even when it comes to pizza here, we spend a half hour discussing the possibilities.

I think that with Prey, our ideas can be restricted by the story line. Not to say that it can't be changed along the way, but some ideas that we have are just totally absent from the story. We just have to decide to keep them for another game...

One cool thing about the way that we do things here is that ideas are not solitary, individual ideas. Sure, everyone has their great moments in thought, but when we all try to think back and decide who actually came up with the idea, it's all a blur. The team aspect is the only way to go, and we're accomplishing it nicely.

A pic is missing here.

David March, 3D artist:

Our game-design process is nonpolitical and very open-ended, which in turn promotes an incredibly creative atmosphere. Of course there are some parameters to stay within, which does nothing but improve focus. I feel like my opinions are valued. Being new onboard I was really impressed on how much input I was able to give. Ideas that were generated materialized almost instantly.

Brainstorming, brainstorming, brainstorming...this is the key to creative design. I believe this is an approach that has proven itself. No one suffers from "group think" here, because everyone is so incredibly individualistic and creative.

Allen Dilling, 3D artist:

Our game-design process on the team is very dynamic and open-minded. We never write an idea in stone since we're always coming up with more and more incredible concepts as the game progresses. All of the developers, gamespace engineers, artists, modelers, and coders have creative input into the game. Our environment really promotes free thinking and team input.

It's never about one person deciding all the content or saying, "This is how it's gonna be!" Most of the final content ideas get tossed around the team as people add to and refine them, and it always comes out a much better product.

The only minor drawback to this style of design is when you know exactly how you want something to work out, but then others don't quite see your vision, and your concept gets tweaked a bit. This may be a slight blow to your ego, but in the end you find out that the changes were validated because you might have overlooked something that another team member thought of.

Many times, I get into a brainstorming frenzy and sketch (or just go ahead and model) a spasm of what I think are cool ideas and then hand them over for everyone to check out. It's a blast when everyone digs these little brainfart designs that spontaneously pop out.

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