My CV includes:
Triple Play Baseball - EA on the Sega Genesis. EA tried 5 times to make a baseball game on that platform but they all sucked. My game was a hit. I left a “Don’t do this”, document for the new designers, after I left EA, they ignored it, and the game became just another product. And then they killed the franchise, which was really sad. But I am very proud of that design.
FIFA Soccer. EA Multiple platforms. To be honest, my design portion was pretty small. It was a well established franchise and we were tweaking the game, not designing a new one like Triple Play.
About 10 other titles at EA, where either I had a minor role or the game was unpublished. The worse thing about working for EA is how many good games they kill. (Save marketing cost.). Bunch of stories there, ask me about Will Write and ’the Sims’ some time. LOL
Total Annihilation - Cavedog. Won multiple awards, including being voted “Best Game Ever” by readers of PC Gamer magazine. Building TA was the most fun I ever had in the game industry.
Total Annihilation: Battle Tactics. - Cavedog. I have some interesting stories about this product.
Helped on Backyard Baseball at Humoungous Games. I screwed up and told an off color joke, and was invited to stop helping on that game. Very embarrassing.
Dungeon Siege - Gas Powered Games. Design and level design. Spend time critiquing the story, which eventually was thrown out. I think that it would have been thrown out anyway, so that was wasted time.
Dungeon Siege: Yesterhaven - GPG. A bit of design and a LOT of level design.
Nova Runner, Gold Rush Fever & Super Chefs - Koolhaus games. You have never heard of these because Koolhaus struggled to find distribution in the early years. But I am proud of all of those titles.
Mega Touch 2 - Koolhaus Games and Square Enix. For Mobile. Good game but again limited distribution. It was being ported to cell phones and mobile, and the major design struggle was to get multiple games to fit in a tiny space. Square Enix was used to Japanese phones which were awesome and had 3G connectivity, and they struggled in the mobile market where the phones were so much weaker and there were so many fragmented types.
The Shroud & Geometry wars. Koolhaus ported these to phones. I managed testing as we were porting existing designs.
A small amount of testing on EA’s Mobile NCAA Football and Madden Football. I did a tiny amount of work on the mobile port of Tiger Woods Golf for EA, and I doubt I got a credit. But I played that game a fair amount and it was really fun. These were Koolhaus’ last port to odd phones - not enough money for very frustrating work. After that we concentrated on iPad, iPhone, and android devices.
Capsized: Port to iOS and Android - This steam Alienware design was being ported to mobile by koolhaus. My major job was watching the design team be ignored by the producers. :-(
The part of that job I felt good about was I had to make these HUGE levels fit into the much smaller memory foot print. I worked really hard to cut down the levels, but keep the interesting design puzzles. I also designed a small new level which was a lot of fun.
Centipede: Origins - Atari / Koolhaus. I was very pleased with the design Ty and I came up with. But the external producers at Atari, cut out all of the things which people could spend money on, then panicked and brought in an external designer who tried to make the game like Candy Crush. That game lost them a lot of money.
Antique Shop - Koolhaus. This was a hidden object game that was supposed to come with a novel. I wrote the first draft of the novel, which was then given to a writer. Worked with her (fact checking stuff from the late 1890’s, and made sure that vital stuff didn’t get cut), Not much design but I did a tonne of testing.
Sports Jeopardy - Koolhaus / Sony TV. The major design was finished when I joined the project but I did a lot of ‘filling in the cracks’ as we finalized things. If the writers of Jeopardy had let go, the design would have been better. I also did a lot of testing. That was a project that never seemed to end. They would ask for these cool features, we would design them we would half build them, then they ordered them cut out and ask for a new set of cool features. Repeat 3 times. It took so long that I can not imagine that it made them any money.
Around two dozen unpublished games. But the ones that I most regret not seeing the light of day were V-Man (a wicked fast 3D side scroller) at EA, and a Hit Man game Koolhaus / IO Interactive, were working on for Mobile. One game I did finish was Space Junk, (flying around collecting power ups while avoiding space junk. Momentum and no friction, and a lot of things you don’t want to hit.) This was an inter-office competition, where I, for once, got to make all the decisions rather than going thru the producers. My game was the most fun, and my team was only one (out of 6) which finished on time. (Those two facts were not unrelated.) I took special pride in this because I had been getting complaints about over scoping, when it was the producers (internal and external) which were calling all the shots. When I was in charge, we produced a complete and polished game in 3 weeks.
***
Design Mistakes:
I’ve worked in the computer game industry so we don’t really do errata. If there was a bug, we would do patches of course. A clever thing in Total Annihilation was the patches were mostly new units. I was not in charge of balancing units in that game, Jake was. Jake loved air units and he didn’t notice that air was too strong. (Worse, I designed a ship for AA, but the first draft of it shot these honking big missiles that were used for blowing up the ground forces. I argued we needed to dump that ship. it was doing the job of the cruiser. But the model and animations looked so cool, that people were reluctant to throw it away. With time pressure, the error was never fixed. Anyway, Chris Taylor had designed TA, so you could add a *.UFO file (a text file that described how to move, animate and control a unit, plus the data for the art). The game was designed that you could drop a *.UFO file in the correct folder and you had a new unit. So the first 4 new units we added were all anti - air units. I was really impressed how some good engineering could add to the game after it was done.
Hmmm.. that reminds me of a mistake I made in TA. We were wrapping up the game and I was told I had one more day to build multiplayer maps. I pulled an all nighter and 'that day’ ended at noon the next morning. But I built 4 new multiplayer maps. Those maps helped the game, (they added a lot more variety to the multiplayer challenges where TA really shone), but in my hurry, I put a metal mine on a slope (which I knew I should not have done), which made one of the 9 squares inaccessible. Testing missed it, and they never patched that bug, so that is one place were I WANTED errata. It was Evad River Crossing and it was one of the few maps designed for 3 players. Since there were a fair number of 3 player games, that map got used a lot. :-(
Normally, the situation is “This is Rick’s design —> Which we LIKE, but we have to throw 20% away. What 20% can we best toss.” Or more demoralizing, “This is Rick’s design, but I’m going to ignore it because I am a producer who makes a lot more money than you. What I can design in 5 minutes off the top of my head, is far better than the hours of work YOU put into this design.” So usually the situation is that the design was solid enough, but due to interference from above, or time constraints, it was not implemented. (Or I thought the design was solid enough, but since it was never finished properly who really knows? Certainly not me.)
The mistakes I got called on most were estimates. “I (Rick) think that this will take 3 months to build.” Well, it actually took 4 months, so you suck. But I have a background in programming, and I hired people who also knew some programming, so our estimates were generally pretty good.
As for design mistakes two stand out because they bugged me. In the Shroud we had a problem with all of these rocks which people would collect while clearing land. They could be put into a stone wall or tossed in the river. Generally people would make a wall around a field that they were working on, then laboriously haul them over to the river dock and dump them to get rid of them for good. (A small number were used in crafting, e.g improving your house, so we didn’t want them all to just vanish.)
After we finished that game I realized that if when we built a wall,we should have disintegrated a bunch of those rocks!!! If you put 12 rocks into the wall, if you pulled it apart you get 8 rocks, or 6 rocks! A tedious chore would have gone faster. It was a very tiny part of the design, but I felt really embarrassed because it was a give-me type decision. No trades off, no downside. Just something I missed.
Likely the biggest mistake I made was in TA: Battle Tactics. This was a cheapie project for them. They pay me a $50,000 US and give me a budget for two artists and we build a whole bunch of scenarios in my basement. (They kept cutting my time line so the game got more and more rushed. Then I got killer carpel tunnel syndrome.) But the scenarios I made, taught a lot of basic military tactics. But I totally forgot to teach, how to handle a fast rush of little units on your base!!! I was so focused on teaching ‘internal lines of communication’, ‘combined arms’, and ‘concentration of forces’, etc. that I forgot that people might want to know how to handle a Zerg rush.
Just a total brain fart for 6 months. There was a bunch of criticism of that game (long story), but the only one I took to heart was no scenarios to practice against rushes.
***
My little history / bio is done, out of time. Maybe I’ll get to the rest tomorrow.
Warm regards, Rick.
And, of course, as a "professional game designer," you've never actually written a rule that you had to change later (as Steve did with the GEV and Heavy Tank rules you mentioned). Errata is apparently something you've never issued for any of your "professional games?" (And, BTW, what games have you designed and sold? I'd love to hear the titles.)
As far as TFT goes, it would have been awfully hard for Steve to have changed ANYTHING, since he no longer owned the rules...and now that he does, I foresee a lot of minor changes over things that he maybe feels need some tweaking. Speaking as a game designer myself, I think your puritanism on this surpasses the bounds of reasonableness.
Also I didn't say your arguments were strawmen, just that your examples were -- since no such situation would ever be likely to arise against anything other than an idiot. (Which means you are NOW making a strawman argument, since you contend I said something I never did, but nice try). And you got the facts wrong anyway. Attention to detail is important in a discussion like this, and if you can't even get the underlying rules that you are using to "prove" a "mistake" was made right, why should I take your argument at face value?
Finally, "Steve didn't specifically say he was going to change it" is your ending argument? He didn't ever say he was specifically going to start charging XP for Talents either -- until he did it -- and even there, we have no idea how the rule will finally come out (or even if it WILL finally come out, for that matter). Which just goes to prove my point; all this angst over a rule that we don't even know the final content of seems...premature...to me.
I won't even bother to address the issue of the +4 DX for the Arquebusier -- if you've ever seen a picture of one firing his weapon, you can see precisely where Steve got that idea from. Which is not to say it's the way I would have done it, but then, it's Steve's game, not mine or yours.
A straw man argument is when I claim you are stating
something that you are not, and then attack this
position that you don’t hold. So my examples of poor
rules on SJ part, is certainly not a straw man argument,
since I am discussing rules which he actually wrote.
In my pbem campaign, one of the players asked me to
change one of their talents. I said, sure, there will be a
TIME penalty. (No experience lost, just it would take a
couple more weeks to switch.) So I have a counter
example of your claim that no one will want to switch
their studies. Somewhat remarkably this example
happened in the last two months (since this is a fairly
rare occurrence).
If you are saying that I claim that the silly rule about the
excessive penalty is “a game-ending mistake” then YOU
are making a straw man argument, since I never said
that. What I claimed was it was a silly rule. Somewhat
poetically, I speculated if he was drunk or hungover
when he wrote that rule. It just makes no sense to me.
Losing 20 experience points would be enough of a
penalty to discourage casual swapping of studies. What
in the world was he thinking when he decided that the
proper penalty would be 1,000 experience OR MORE?!?
I think that he suggested that if you do something totally
out of character (e.g. murder someone if you are a good
person) that you should lose 10 experience. But
swapping talents is 100 times worse? (Or more???) It
just does not make sense to me.
I am a professional game designer and I claimed that
some of Steve’s rules seemed very poor and said that I
could find examples. You asked for examples and I
gave two.
Steve has made other mistakes. In OGRE he made
Heavy Tanks cost twice what they should and made
GEV’s too mobile. In GURPS, he made it so complex
that it went from a big part of the RPG’s in the local
game stores to non-existent.
(Are there some people who like GURPS? Of course.
Has GURPS market share dropped significantly in the
last 15 years. Yes. If you think this drop has happened
for some other reason, I would be curious what you
think the reason(s) are.)
***
I reread the whole blunderbuss thread just now, and SJ
never said he was going to fix the Arquebus being the
most accurate missile weapon in the game. Almost all
of his comments were on the blunderbuss. The one
sentence in which he talked about the Arquebus,
sounded like he did not intend to change it.
So I think it is likely that if you need long range, accurate
missile fire in the new TFT, then the arquebus will remain
your go-to weapon.
***
Is Steve a good game designer? As I said before, I think
he makes a high percentage of correct decisions, so yes.
Tho I am actually far more impressed with his business
skills.
But if someone were to argue that there is no point in
discussing or criticizing his designs until after they are
locked in and published, because he is so good. Well
that argument would carry little weight with me.
(I am not claiming that this is your exact position, but
one of your statements was in the direction of that
ballpark. Which is what prompted my comment about
SJ design is not flawless.)
Further, arguing that his design is poor, is not ‘policing’
how other people play. Discussing his game design is
not ‘enforcing’, my style of play on other people.
However, when Neil say that you have to play his way or
he will throw you in prison, your argument will be much
stronger. ;-D
***
The arguments about the fast healing spell he
suggested has generated ideas in the SJG forum about
damage to fST conversions, and the point that if we have
fast healing, we need to generated more rules to support
that style of play. e.g. what happens if someone is
stunned by taking 5 points of damage and then is combat
healed for 2 points. Is he still stunned?
I think that there is a good chance that SJ would have
missed that point if it was not brought up in the forums but
now the question will be answered in the new TFT rules.
So I can argue that a clear good has come from this
debate.
Warm regards, Rick.
My counter-arguments are a good deal less silly than your strawman examples were to begin with. And as far as the 1000 XP go, he clearly intended to punish indecisive players. None of the players I ever played with did the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" thing; "Blue! No, wait, Green!" Is the punishment excessive? YMMV, but I don't see it as a game-ending "mistake" on Steve's part. As for his comment he was going to change these things -- just look at the Blunderbuss thread.
Wrote what?
I can give some examples of Steve Jackson rules which are terrible.
I wondered, was he drunk or hungover when he wrote this?
Rick
Different strokes for different folks.
But why is it so unacceptable to allow a healing spell to be created for the game by the designer (which, given SJ's reputation for carefully thinking his way through things, will be well-balanced in the context of the rest of the game) and then, if you feel so strongly about denying it to your players, simply saying that the spell doesn't exist in your world? You can have it your way, and other people can have it theirs. Rather than "policing" how other people play, why can't we just say; "Okay, no big deal, it doesn't work that way in my world because mana can't interact with living tissue in a non-confrontational way -- it can blow you up, but it can't put the pieces back together again."
As the GM, you can make your world any way you want, but why try to enforce YOUR rules on anyone else?