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My RSS Feedhttp://www.tobygard.com/index.htmlHot News!entobygardgames@gmail.comCopyright 2009 Toby Gard2010-03-09T09:25:43-08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:38:45 -0800Numberstobygardgames@gmail.comPersonalcomic2010-03-09T09:25:43-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/882d61fbefbbc3a9b7c8d93af223c948-9.html#unique-entry-id-9http://www.tobygard.com/files/882d61fbefbbc3a9b7c8d93af223c948-9.html#unique-entry-id-9

You know, there’s something about numbers that doesn’t seem to mix too well with artists. I’m no great artist but when I was young I loved drawing while maths left me cold. However hard people tried to convince me that mastering numbers would be for my own good, I refused to apply myself to learning them.

I didn’t want to learn maths, I wanted to learn magic. Not the pulling rabbits out of hats kind, but the real thing with the beard and the staff and the robe and hat.

As a wee boy reading fantasy novels, I always wondered about the people who didn’t learn magic. I mean, if magic worked and it let you do whatever you liked, what kind of idiot wouldn’t want to learn that? Disregarding the fantasy worlds where only a special few have the ’talent’ for magic, there are plenty of fantasy worlds where magic is just a secret knowledge that only the select few know. It’s the guys in those worlds who still use tools to plow fields instead of by snapping their fingers that I don’t get.

Seriously, if you saw someone doing real magic, you’d make some effort to work out how, right? I know I would. In fact, I’d drop everything for the chance to learn a few god-like powers. You’d be mad not to!

It was only when I was much older that I realised that this world does have a kind of magic and I didn’t want to learn it because I thought it was the root of all evil; money.

The people adept at wielding the real magic wear suits not robes. They work in towers looming over the centers of our cities like modern day Saurons. The bankers and financiers don’t make anything. They deal purely in money, applying their arcane knowledge to grow enormous pools of that green magic. With it, they can have whatever they want.

If I had really understood it in those terms when I was younger I may have listened better in maths class. I still think that greedily going after money for money’s sake is an empty pursuit, but on the other hand, not learning magic when it exists does seem pretty foolish.

(By the way, hope you like the new posting format. I’ll try to upload a new comic every week. Fingers crossed.)

]]>Jet Car Stuntstobygardgames@gmail.comPersonal2010-03-02T22:36:44-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/0a65cc5f7a937902322086aa8eeedcd4-8.html#unique-entry-id-8http://www.tobygard.com/files/0a65cc5f7a937902322086aa8eeedcd4-8.html#unique-entry-id-8
The problem is that I have no games consoles until we find a permanent place to put our mountain of crap that is currently in storage. Consequently, I’ve been spending a bit more time than usual checking out iPhone games.

I have been convinced by the iPhone as a gaming platform ever since it was first announced but for the most part I’ve been pretty disappointed by the games that I’ve played. (Although I have not played enough of them for my opinion to be statistically relevant.)

I had dreamed two ears ago, (an insane dream) that Nintendo might start porting some of DS games to the platform. At the very least I had hoped that some of the better third party developers would bring their back catalogues to the iPhone. But after two and a half years there have still been very few DS ports. Cooking Mama (iTunes link) has finally made the jump but I am still waiting for some Phoenix Wright action.

My hankering for DS ports comes from my perception of an overall higher quality of games found on that platform in comparison to the iPhone.

Admittedly there are iPhone game powerhouses like Gameloft that have been pumping out games that are way above the appstore standard, but I’ve been waiting for something really awesome; a killer iPhone exclusive game. For me at least, I found one this week.

Jet Car Stunts (itunes link) is good.

From the simple radiosity inspired flat shaded graphics to the Stunt Car racer inspired acrobatics, this game just keeps bringing me back for more. Admittedly the difficulty level is steep, but death is so common and so meaningless thanks to the handy reset button that the often hilarious wipe outs and near misses are more funny than frustrating.

The tutorials are a perfect intro to a control system that feels intuitive but has a great deal of depth. The steering (via accelerometer) is perfectly implemented and I love the sound.

Jet Car Stunt’s short bursts of high skill gameplay coupled masses of re-playability makes for a perfect phone game in my opinion.

While I still wish for the iPhone’s Phantom Hour Glass to while away longer journeys, I find myself firing up Jet Car Stunts whenever I can sneak in a spare minute.

If you were ever a fan of Stunt Car Racer by Geoff Crammond, you may find this to be its spiritual successor; a game that follows that same death-defying track, while strapping on massive great rockets and launching itself through hoops like some deranged Darwin Award winner.

Five thumbs up!]]>Half an updatetobygardgames@gmail.comHome2010-02-12T11:56:06-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/d7c9c3dc3436bbea3984ee1bc365cee4-7.html#unique-entry-id-7http://www.tobygard.com/files/d7c9c3dc3436bbea3984ee1bc365cee4-7.html#unique-entry-id-7here.

I’m glad a few people have come to have a look because I was a bit sad when I put them up in November and virtually no one came to see them. Meanwhile I have not done much updating to the site, but that’s because I have been working on a big update. Specifically I have been morphing this site into my personal website and creating a separate consulting company site, which is looking really good, but still not ready to launch.

Meanwhile I thought I’d go ahead and push through an update on this site, stripping out the consultancy parts and instating a more casual style more in keeping with a personal homepage.
]]>Homepagetobygardgames@gmail.comIndustry2010-03-03T17:02:00-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/576456046fa3b7f9db37ebc49d6f09f9-6.html#unique-entry-id-6http://www.tobygard.com/files/576456046fa3b7f9db37ebc49d6f09f9-6.html#unique-entry-id-6

I have been busy these last two months incorporating a new company for my consultancy business.

Today it is finally all systems go!

The website can be found at www.focalpointgames.com. It is aimed primarily at game developers, both old and new. I have been working on some pretty in-depth game design articles, two of which are available right now, both dealing with action adventure level design. I hope to make the site a goto place for game designers to get a slightly different perspective on game design.

Meanwhile this place will now be the place that I will be putting the things I want to talk about that have less concrete value i.e. my opinions.

Thank you for checking out my sites.

Toby]]>Articlestobygardgames@gmail.comPersonal2009-11-26T23:34:54-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/78122e5874d77f1fb377ba8225ee5863-5.html#unique-entry-id-5http://www.tobygard.com/files/78122e5874d77f1fb377ba8225ee5863-5.html#unique-entry-id-5

The goal of this website was for it to be more than a place to market my service, and more than a place where I could be a damn pundit. The idea was that I would make a place where people who were aspiring to enter the games industry might come to find some useful information.

Things have been busy over the last couple of months, but I have put together the first of several planned articles and opened a new section up on the site menu; Articles.

For now there is only one article, it is a selection of sketches that drove some of the marketing imagery for Tomb Raider Legend and Anniversary.

I hope you enjoy them.]]>Piracy Part1: A Global Markettobygardgames@gmail.comIndustry2009-11-02T13:04:54-08:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/1a8255994eb8c884333e9fe47c031133-4.html#unique-entry-id-4http://www.tobygard.com/files/1a8255994eb8c884333e9fe47c031133-4.html#unique-entry-id-4

Very few parts of the entertainment industry are actively trying to serve consumer needs, instead they are almost universally holding on to business models that no longer make sense in the internet age.

Fundamentally, consumers want their entertainment on demand. They want to get their entertainment cheaply and easily. The majority of tech savvy consumers have experienced downloaded entertainment and they like it.

iTunes is great. The browsing experience is good, buying is easy and delivery is instant. Now that DRM is slowly being phased out, buying music through iTunes is increasingly a decent alternative to piracy.

Just to be clear, I don't condone, nor participate in piracy, but that's because as someone who has worked in the entertainment industry, I can't bring myself to download other people's work without paying for it. Not if there is even the slightest hope that the actual creators of the works get to see some benefit from my enjoyment. That doesn't stop me feeling slightly miffed that a horde of consumers do pirate entertainment and would consider anyone who did pay for it to be a mug.

The following total revenue breakdown for 2003 shows where the Western music industry get most of their money. (taken from Wikipedia)

The paying consumers are essentially subsidizing those who don't. In an ideal world, prices would be low enough and access to legal downloaded entertainment (whether music, films or games) would be ubiquitous enough that everyone would rather do the honest thing and support the artists they like.

But how is that possible?

There is a digital class system that powerfully promotes piracy. Residents in the US have access to vastly superior online content distribution services; Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, Rhapsody etc.

In the minds of global consumers, the internet has flattened the world market, leaving only language barriers between people from different countries. When a consumer from country X is unable to get entertainment that is easily available to buy in country Y, they feel like second class citizens and look for other ways to get it. Invariably this means piracy.

As history has abundantly shown, class systems lead to resentment and revolution. The world over, potential consumers of entertainment feel perfectly justified in obtaining illegal copies of entertainment because they have no alternative available for them to obtain it legally.

Much of the problem lies in international taxation. A truly global marketplace is difficult when every country wants to get their cut of the sale. Until the world governments make life easier, global marketplaces will be difficult and complex to set up. Even when such market places have been created (such as iTunes) the sense of inequality is still present when UK residents see what a large taxation markup they must pay in comparison to US consumers.

Ignoring localization issues and taxation issues, you still find rights holders that do not distribute their work worldwide. A large proportion of iTunes content is only available in specific territory locked stores. Conventional (and I think wrong) wisdom looks at the current scale of international marketplaces and disregards those where piracy is rife. This only exacerbates the problem and if the entertainment industries don't wise up and actively work to distribute their content worldwide and on an equal footing then their primary markets will also collapse.

Because the class system works the other way too. If the consumers in the big entertainment markets see that the rest of the world is getting the same content for free, then they will also feel justified in pirating. Who wants to be the mug?

Next Week: Piracy part 2: Digital distribution of games.

Galleon Concept Art

]]>Website Redesigntobygardgames@gmail.comPersonal2009-09-28T20:07:12-07:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/be3c01739779891df217ae32644bfd90-3.html#unique-entry-id-3http://www.tobygard.com/files/be3c01739779891df217ae32644bfd90-3.html#unique-entry-id-3
Oh, and check out the showreel in the About section.
]]>Consultancytobygardgames@gmail.comPersonal2009-09-14T18:50:54-07:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/5efa6ecd68bd71892a3ab846ad234098-2.html#unique-entry-id-2http://www.tobygard.com/files/5efa6ecd68bd71892a3ab846ad234098-2.html#unique-entry-id-2
I worked for Eidos as a publishing designer, giving feedback to external teams, but in that role there was always a certain element of command intrinsic to publisher feedback. Often that meant that the feedback I gave had to be general rather then specific and I didn’t feel I could really provide as much value as a consultant hired by the developer would.

Most external feedback developers get tend to be from publishing until the game is at Alpha or Beta when focus testing begins.

I actually think it can be very useful to have a fresh pair of experienced eyes come in and give a new perception on a project while it’s still in development. Detailed analysis of design documents, risk assessment and suggestions for missed opportunities in a game’s design seems like a useful services to offer, especially when the client is free to take it or leave it.

Having said that I’ve never heard of people in the games industry looking for external feedback other than focus testing, I mean everyone’s got opinions, right?

I think that there are a few aspects of design that can be managed by a an external developer (much of the story aspects of games spring to mind) but it will be interesting to see whether the game development industry is interested in design consultancy services.]]>Hollywoodtobygardgames@gmail.comIndustry2009-09-17T18:47:13-07:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/23254cc43801d35089ef8769cb95655b-1.html#unique-entry-id-1http://www.tobygard.com/files/23254cc43801d35089ef8769cb95655b-1.html#unique-entry-id-1
I imagined a time when so many people would work on a game that there would be no use fro generalists, just legions of specialists, tiny cogs in a production machine and I decided that the only place for a generalist would be at the top, someone who understood game making across multiple disciplines.

But two things had to change:

First, we had to stop reinventing the wheel every project. I imagined that people would begin to make game making engines; general tools that the industry would use to make development easier and allow new team members not to have to start from square one each time they changed studios.

I even tried to make one myself with Galleon.

Things have come a long way in this area with middleware such as the Unreal engine, and I think we are close to having some platforms that will become the equivalent of a stock film camera for making games.

Secondly we had to learn how to scale up and down efficiently during production.

Movies commonly gestate for ten years or more before everything is prepared, the green light goes on and hundreds of millions of dollars flow through a team that never even existed a week earlier.

Teams of people are hired and let go in waves as the production moves through rapid layered phases. Experts assemble, work together and then disband, their jobs done, knowing that if the production is a success, they will enjoy royalties for years to come.

The games industry works nothing like that. Instead it sits in an awkward middle ground. It employs much of its staff as though they are permanent, when in fact, they know that they will lay most of them off when production ramps down retaining only a slim group for the next preproduction phase.

Without exception, (as far as I’m aware) those who are let go lose any rights to future royalties or bonuses after having spent the last X months in crunch.

It’s a bit nasty isn’t it? In fact I think you could call it almost dishonest.

Luckily some people have realised that the industry is moving towards freelancers, and have struck out on their own, offering developers a more honest outsourcing alternative to the hiring and firing cycle.

A couple of them contacted me after reading my comments on the web.

Fireproof games provide full in game environments to clients, while Darkside Game Studios offer a wide range of services all the way up to full game design and production.

Concept artists and musicians have successfully worked freelance in the games industry for years. How long before the rest of us can?

What do you think? Will the games industry ever mature enough to really leave this bloated home-brew stage?]]>Intellectual Propertytobygardgames@gmail.comIndustry2009-09-25T18:43:34-07:00http://www.tobygard.com/files/cf76faf7eb9060d0f7c8e7ccf0ae49e2-0.html#unique-entry-id-0http://www.tobygard.com/files/cf76faf7eb9060d0f7c8e7ccf0ae49e2-0.html#unique-entry-id-0 Mockupbase

So you have a great idea for a game. You believe that it could be big, huge maybe. You have the ability to pull it off and (lets just say) the team to make it happen.

But will you benefit from it as authors do from their work?

The Intellectual Property of your game will belong to its publisher. Benefits from merchandising, cross media exploitation and licensing will go to the publisher not the author. Even if you own the development studio, your position will not be much better. You can negotiate a cut of these extra benefits but it will be unlikely you'll be able to secure the rights to them unless you can self-fund.

The publishing argument is this: The publisher spends the marketing money to make the IP successful and it's the marketing rather than the game itself that leads its success. The publisher is in essence is paying to make the game a brand and expects to take all the rewards for doing so.

Now you could also argue that the originators and leaders of the project are not really responsible either; it's the gestalt of the team that makes a game what it is. This is absolutely true, but they are even less likely to share in the success of the IP.

The question is, how can you, as a designer, programmer or artist, actually benefit from your work beyond your pay cheque?

There are a few studios that have grown large and wealthy enough to define their own terms. Those that can, are run by astute business men and therein lies the answer; a creative worker who is not also a great businessman will aways be taken advantage of by the people with the funding.

Does that mean that ideas are worthless? I have heard some business men argue that that's exactly the case. Ideas, I hear, are things that everyone has. There's a constant influx of young people bursting with ideas, willing to give them away just for the chance to make what they want to make.

But what does this do to the industry as a whole?

it makes many of the developers I have met keep their ideas to themselves. Thousands of potentially brilliant game ideas that will never see the light of day because no avenue exists for them to be made without the originator being left out in the cold.

The path to self publishing, to keeping the rights to your ideas, is open only to those who can self fund, or those who can build a business plan that circumvents the mainstream computer game development process. Iphone development is one of those and finding venture capital backing is perhaps another.

The film industry works slightly differently. Much of the cast and crew are given royalty deals as standard that are honoured for many years after the film's release. The writers, actors and artists who work on a film benefit directly from its success, receiving residuals from companies that they have not worked for in years.

I have never heard of a games company that continues to give royalties to ex-employees, few even promise them at all.

When I owned Confounding Factor, each of my employees received a royalty agreement that promised royalties even after they left the company (on the condition that they stayed until the project's completion.) Of course, Confounding Factor never made any money (which was my fault) so sadly it didn't do them any good. But it was at least an attempt to be a bit fairer.

People call the games industry young and in this respect I think it most shows its immaturity. Not rewarding the creative people who make games, is probably one of the main reasons why originality is so hard to find when you go to your local game shop.

Google expects its employees to have their own pet projects, they expect their staff to allot a small percentage of their work time to developing these new ideas. If google uses these ideas, they can result in very large bonuses for the individuals who invented them.

Perhaps a similar scheme could help open the creative floodgates that I think are blocked in our industry at present.]]>