[Note: This post (originally published at darklorde.com) is all about the Engines of Play. If you are not familiar with Taste/Satisfaction Maps and their uses, the Big 5, Self-Determination Theory, etc, I highly recommend watching this video before reading the article. It will make so much more sense. Like, Oh Em Gee.]
A Random Encounter With Relic
I’m in San Francisco. It’s GDC, so the sidewalks of the Moscone Center are packed to bursting with nerds of every stripe. The day is bright. I cross Fourth street, on my way to Moscone North--and someone calls, “Jason!”
I wasn't surprised--it happens to me a lot at GDC. Stay in the games biz for long enough, and GDC will eventually become one big reunion.
What happened next, though, absolutely does not happen every day.
A friendly-faced fella pushes his way out of the crowd, and introduces himself as one Mitch Lagran, a Lead Designer at Relic Entertainment. While I unsuccessfully suppressed my fanboy reaction (because DAWN OF WAR OMFG), Mitch explains that he had attended my Engines of Play talk last year...
...and that Relic had actually implemented the methods I had laid out in that talk.
He claimed that he wanted to thank me for it because it had made a huge difference to their process and was great stuff. I stared at him and tried to think who had put him up to this.
I mean, no one actually implements that stuff. Come on! That’s not how the GDC works!
The GDC is supposed to be a place where you go and listen to people talking about lessons and techniques--ones that you desperately wish you could apply because wow it would make your dev life so much better--and then you go back to your studio and everyone tells you about how yeah maybe that stuff worked for those guys, but that it won’t work here, see, because our situation is different.
And then you sigh, and maybe you try again in three months. Eventually you just go about your business.
GDC is not where RELIC FREAKING ENTERTAINMENT goes to find whole new process for their game conception phases.
But, here’s this guy, and he’s shaking my hand, and he's expressing his gratitude and his appreciation, and I so I play it cool and say, “Really?! You… actually used my stuff?!?"
He nods.
I ask, "Uh… so, what happened?!”
He told me. Later, he sent me a more detailed description of what the results had been. And what he said blew my mind.
So, I asked him if I could write it up, and share it.
A More Proper Introduction
That’s the back story for what this post is about. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present something akin to an actual case study for what happens when you apply the Engines of Play (which includes these charts called Taste Maps, and the process of analysis that goes into them) to a real dev environment.
Hrm.
By “actual case study” what I really mean is “the guys at Relic were kind enough to describe in some detail what they did with the ideas, and what the results were”. That isn’t quite a full case study. It's more like a front-line report or something. BUT STILL. CLOSE ENOUGH.
I mean COME ON! How often does this kind of thing just happen?! Never. That's how often.
A quick reminder: The Engines of Play is a way to figure out what kind of player taste you are trying to target with your game, in a way that is quite a bit more specific than “achievers” or “shooter players”. The methods involved do require a little bit of coming-up-to-speed, but they benefit from being both fairly intuitive and being backed up by systems that have a metric-fuck-ton of academic white papers and research done on them.
Remember all that? No? Well, here's a couple of videos for you.
Good now? Great!
A Conversation With Relic
I mentioned earlier that Mitch Lagran was kind enough to send me a long description of how he and his team have used said Engines. For our purposes here, I think it’s best if I let Mitch speak for himself.
Mitch: Hey Jason, it was nice getting to meet you down at GDC. Hope you had a good one this year.
Likewise. You have a cool beard.
Mitch: Given that you seemed interested in feedback around our use of Engines of Play at Relic, I figured I’d give you a run-down of how we’ve used it and how it has worked out.
You da man.
Prepro: Good
Mitch: It’s worth keeping in mind that we are still early on in our production, so we haven’t started adapting your model with a production oriented mentality yet. I’m guessing that when we do, there may be some slight shifts on how we use it to communicate.
I can tell you from experience that its use in production is likely to simply diminish. Once the key design targets have been set, we found that the model drifts into the “background lore” of the project. It doesn’t seem to be all that useful during the meat of production.
We did find that near the end of production we experienced a brief resurgence in interest in the work. As we prepared our communication plans, and as the game was starting to come together, there was a storm of new conversations around confirming whether or not we had built what we had intended to build--and Taste Maps are great for that.
At that point, too, there were a lot of new people coming onto the project who had not been exposed to the method, and both found it surprising that we had done all that work so far in advance and found it surprising that it seemed to work.
So: high use in preproduction. Low use during production. Brief flurry of use right as the launch plans are being discussed in earnest for the first time. That was our experience, anyway.
I look forward to learning whether or not your experience turns out to be similar!
