How I got into the Games Industry

The other night, I was talking to someone while we were sitting around after playing a board game. They wondered how I got into the game industry to begin with.

It is an unlikely story. I was homeless, living in a tent in the woods, and this guy I know who was working on a D&D title for SSI - Al Qadim: the Genie's Curse - needed a play-tester. He knew I used to spend lots of time inventing games, so that's a reason he asked me. This was back before cell-phones and email and all that, so I am not even sure how I got in touch with the guy. Maybe a party in Northampton. Something like that. But I said yes, and that began my career in the computer game industry. 

 

I used to get up from my tent, sneak into a gym nearby and shower, take the bus over to Northampton, MA, and show up for my job as a video game play-tester.

Luckily, I got along with everybody, and I had good design and computer skills. As time progressed, they let me do some design work as well, lay out some levels and side quests. It was pretty interesting work. Al-Qadim was an action Adventure game set in the Arabian Nights D&D universe. What do I remember about it at this point, 30 years later? Not much... there was a big genie, some caves to explore, some oceans to cross, and someone snuck out of the village under a sheet or something. Maybe a cyclops hid under a sheet?

It was a strange time for me. I would get checks and not know what to do, since I had been living a scavenging lifestyle for a little bit. I don't think I even had a bank account at that point. I got an electric guitar with my first paycheck and stored it in a friend's room. They even misspelled my name on the first few checks. "Jim Dubious".

 

After The Genie's Curse released, they signed me up for the next game - Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall, by SSI - as an assistant designer. Along the way of that game's development, they fired the lead designer, and I stepped into the role. 

This was another action RPG, where you are slowly turning into a giant bug, and have to find out the reason why and reverse it. Strangely that is almost all I remember about it. But... I think there were "molemen" that lived in different caves and they were very important to the story. And there was a time traveling spider queen???

It was different coming in part way through a project as lead designer, as opposed to starting off that way, as I did for Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom Sim. I just carried things to completion and made few high level decisions. The interface and engine were already set, the story pretty much determined. Lots of game play tweaks though. That's one of the less glamorous, but vital, sides of game design and development: play it again and again, adjust some numbers, do it again. It is something I have done a lot of over the years. I would say it is central to making games. Especially to making them play well. Here's an example of how I did that with the City of Demons board game.

 

Read more about my history: How I got into Game Design 

How I Got Into Game Design

 I was out at breakfast with a friend the other day, talking about my current board game projects, and he asked me how I got into game design in the first place. Here's the story:

I played the boxed set of D&D and then AD&D, starting around age 7 - way back in 1977. Soon I started making dungeons, and like everyone else, pored over the various books and manuals for the game. One part I really appreciated was the note from Gary Gygax at the beginning where he said that the book was a guide and that you were free to use or not use whatever section or bits you like, or even invent your own. What a great thing to hear as a young person! This was a game that included your creativity and imagination. I took it to heart, and when playing any game, I always wondered what I might do differently if I made the game. So that was a good perspective to start from. 

The other thing that helped was that my father got a Commodore PET, a (now) ancient computer that had a cassette tape for reading in programs. We got some cassette tapes with many programs on them, mainly games. Everything was in basic, and you could see the code. And even better, modify it! So my brother and I, even before we knew programming, learned how to delete a line or two. We would delete different lines of code and then run the program and see what happened. In one game, Dungeon - a simple kill the monsters and gather treasure dungeon crawler, we found the perfect line to delete in order to change the shape of the dungeon. Instead of rooms and corridors, it made a random huge room with pillars! How fun!
 

 

After that I learned to program BASIC, and was always trying to make adventure games like Colossal Cave. Find the rust remover in a random field and use it on the stuck lever so you can deactivate the electric fence and go somewhere. That was in a game I made when I was 10 years old or so. 

 
From there is was making and playing a lot of games. I am a huge fan of iteration for learning how to do something, and how to refine your designs. 

 

Read more about my history: How I got into the Games Industry 

Hits & Misses

I've been making games for most of my life, ever since I was a kid. In my twenties I got a job as a professional game designer. After that I created a lot, in a lot of mediums: Web games, Palm Pilot games, card and dice games, conceptual games, board games. 

One thing I've learned is that every game you make can't be your best game. Sometimes due to circumstances, your game is underdeveloped. Sometimes you try a new idea, and it doesn't work out. Sometimes you make a good game, but it falls flat anyway. Sometimes there are hits, and sometimes there are misses. 

This is not to say that your effort has no influence. It's to remind you that there are circumstances and influences in the world in addition to you that affect what happens. Development timelines, funding, marketing, shifting costs and norms, what medium you're working in, who's on your team, publishers and distributors going out of business or being acquired, trouble in your family and personal life: all these can impact your project.

I remember a period of time when I was having incredibly bad insomnia, and was still developing web games. I got through my current one, The Journey to New Earth, and it worked! But afterwards I kept finding very weird bugs and also realized the game needed much more development to play well. So I took the opportunity to revise it.

My games on the Palm Pilot gained dedicated and excited players. Many players of Adventure Solitaire counted it as their favorite game on the Palm OS. And I made a modest living for a while. But then the Palm OS itself got overshadowed by new and exciting cell phone technology -- smart phones. So there went that for me. And yes, I could have ported them to phones, and then other phones, and so on. But learning each phone and OS is a big project, and I decided against it.

I ported one of my web games to Java. It took four months. Did anyone play it? Maybe one guy. So much time, so little result. I ported some Palm Pilot games to Windows. Same thing. They'd been successful on those other platforms, but not on the new ones. So then I chose to make board games, in part to avoid the obsolescence issue for digital games.

Some luck's bad, some luck's good. Majesty wouldn't have been the game it was if it hadn't had several extra years of development due to switching publishers a couple of times, once at least because the then current publisher was going out of business. So that was some good luck that led to a great game.

I think it is helpful to think of your entire pantheon of created games as an iterative, interactive process of design. You can learn something from each one, and that experience contributes in some way to the next one. This view also helps you not get too attached to whether one particular game succeeds or fails. Work as well as you can on your current game, understanding that all the circumstances and events will have effects, and see what happens. And then make your next game!