by J. Mark Tanjutco

Below is the second part of my interview with Max Schaefer of Runic Games. Sorry for its long delay. With the recent announcement of Torchlight coming to XBLA, this is good timing to finally get it out there!

Mark:  Based off of what you have told me, the business culture at Runic seems to be really focused on lean management and lean processes.

So speaking to the other side of the business, the creative culture, how would you describe that? How would you approach the creative decisions that go into making a game like Torchlight?

With such a small staff does everyone just have a big pow‑wow and get together and just bounce ideas off each other? What does that process look like?

Max:  We have an office that doesn’t even have cubicles: we just have desks and this large rectangular space. It’s a very open office and everyone is pretty much talking to each other. We have meetings (where we are) basically turning the chairs around and start talking. You don’t have to call people into a room or anything like that.

It’s a very collaborative process and we have an art director and we have aesthetical leads and they set the procedures and set the look, but to be the most efficient, you really should empower your people to own their own areas in the game and to be able to get a series of approvals and what have you for every little thing along the way. Read more

Shortly after I interviewed Travis Baldree at Runic, I also had the chance to chat with Max Schaefer, of Diablo and Blizzard North fame. As someone who lost hours and hours of my life to that game and its sequel, it was an incredible privilege to be able to chat with Max. We talked about how he broke into the game development business, his project/game development history, lessons learned from Blizzard North and Flagship Studios, and finally lessons applied to the making of Torchlight.

This is Part One of the interview, and I will post the second part as soon as I have time to make edits. (Which will hopefully be a lot faster than I got to this one. Blogging fail!)

Mark Tanjutco:  Max, I wanted to start off by saying thanks, first of all, for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with me today. I really appreciate that.

Max Schaefer:  No problem at all. Thanks for having us chat.

Mark:  Yeah, of course. So I just got done talking with Travis, and that was a good conversation.

For readers of my blog who are unfamiliar with your background, could you maybe spend a few minutes talking about how it is you got into the game industry? And maybe the companies you’ve worked on and major projects you’ve worked on?

Max:  Sure. It’s a little bit strange. I’ve been in the industry long enough that when I got in, there were no university programs or really anything you could do with your education that would directly funnel you into the video game business.

Actually, in college, I did not intend to go into the computer game business. It just sort of happened. I have an architecture degree that I have never used. And after college, I got a computer for graduation. I was hoping I’d get a car, but got a computer. [laughter] Read more

Following is the second half of my interview with Travis Baldree. This part of the discussion focused on things like corporate culture and what makes for a great game company, in business terms. Hope you enjoy!

Mark:  What were kind of the biggest moments of success for you in your career so far or the moments where you had a lot of gratification about what it was you were doing?

Travis:  ”Fate” was really gratifying to do because it was I think the first opportunity I had to make something that I wanted to make that people responded to and enjoyed, and I didn’t feel I was compromising a huge amount on what I wanted to do. I did my years at WildTangent and sort of earned the right to get to do it. And having it go out and being able to interact with people who were playing the game and enjoyed it was enormously rewarding. I got to have my hands all over it. I was the only programmer and the only designer as it were, and it was fun to just be that close to it.

Releasing “Torchlight” was also really rewarding because it was the first time that I got to fully release a game with the team that we have. And all together we put it out, and all together we designed it. And the response was much better than we expected, and that was really fantastic. I think those were probably the two best moments for me. Read more

I had the great chance to interview Travis Baldree (and one other individual, to be named later) of Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight. I must admit with some embarrassment that my interview took place all the way back in late September. It’s odd to think that was a full two months ago, but between some of my real life responsibilities, it was tough to get this interview (and its twin) transcribed and ready for posting.

Anyway, I’ve finally finished what is the first “one-fourth” of my interviews with the folks at Runic Games. I basically have split the interview with Travis into two parts, and will then shortly (hopefully) post two parts of a second interview with another principal over at Runic. We talk about his career in games, his influences, and what he and the Runic team have accomplished with Torchlight. Hope you enjoy! Read more

Well, I lost way more of my life playing Fallout New Vegas than I care to admit. Let’s just say that when you consider the myriad decisions that one gets to make in game – all of which impact the game’s final cutscene endings – there’s a virtually limitless amount of replayability in the title. However, there are four major factional endings that you can work towards, and in the past several weeks, I played the game enough to get to 3 out of the 4 endings. A couple of those play-throughs, I didn’t really beat every side quest or discover every area. But in my final play-through, I think I completed all but a handful of the side quests. Still didn’t discover every map area, though.

Which is all  a long way of stating that FNV is a good game. There’s a lot of meat to this title, and honestly, for people with less time on their hands, this is a game that could easily sustain them for 3 to 6 months, particularly if you’re the type of gamer that likes experimenting with different play-styles.

As I’ve talked about in the past, there’s a split in RPG design…really, in game design for a lot of different genres…between open world gaming and gaming “on rails.” FNV is the definition of an open world game. For someone who may not have played Fallout 3 or Oblivion, it’s almost TOO much to do, once you stray from the path of the main story line. This is why I think an above average number of gamers will simply have to play and beat the game multiple times. What you miss out on in terms of “discovery” in your second or third play-through will be more than made up for in terms of “completionism.” For those with a collector’s mentality, this is the game you are looking for. Read more

Since I got the new job (and even in the couple of weeks before that), it’s tougher for me to be consistent in adding thoughtful comment to this blog. However, there are still tons and tons of blogs articles that I run across that I want to share with people. Thus, I installed a neat little plug-in that grabs articles from my Google Reader and shares them to this blog. You’ll see these articles now appearing in the right hand column of this homepage. Although this content isn’t original, it’s an easy way for me to stay somewhat engaged with this site, even as my time begins to get constrained.

Well, I didn’t make any blog posts last week and in fact my posts have been pretty infrequent over the past couple weeks. I’ve had some things going on IRL (good things) that have taken up some of my time. However, I did want to check in with a quick post on content I will be adding this month.

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

I’ve put probably 50 hours into Fallout New Vegas, so I am reasonably confident that I can write a good review on the game. That’s if I can put down Fable 3 and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood for long enough, since those games are next on tap.

Also, I have some thoughts on the landscape of the sports gaming market, particularly in light of the cancellation of

Image via Wikipedia

NBA Elite 11 (the EA sports franchise). I guess I should be more specific and say I want to talk a bit about EA specifically, and its market position in regard to the NFL, the NBA, and mixed martial arts (of all things).

Finally, the thing I am most excited about. I’ve got a great developer interview to share later this month, featuring Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer from Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight.

So stay tuned, and apologies for my lack of posts. I’ve just been slammed with real life stuff, but it hasn’t been a bad thing.

Related articles

• NBA Elite 11 canceled, series handed off to EA Tiburon (joystiq.com)
• EA Eliminates Two Execs Following NBA Elite 11 Cancellation (1up.com)
• The Aftermath of NBA Elite 11 (1up.com)
• NPD October 2010: 2K11, Fallout: New Vegas Have Strong Debuts (cinemablend.com)

There was a really interesting opinion piece by Leigh Alexander over at Kotaku yesterday; essentially, it was all about the “game-ification” of real life tasks and chores. This is, of course, the type of issue that is very near and dear to my heart, as I think it is a huge driver for getting the gaming industry recognized as a meaningful contributor to not just the aesthetic and artistic qualities of society, but the functional qualities as well.

A lot of viewpoints are tackled in the article, but one thing I want to drill down on is something Leigh highlights: namely, that game designers have spent years and literally combined lifetimes in figuring out ways to get gamers to keep playing a game for “one more turn.” Indeed, the rise of free-to-play (F2P) game design that monetizes incremental, micro-actions points to the fact that many game designers have struck the right chord in this space. Obvious examples are the Zynga suite of games on Facebook, but maybe less obvious examples (to the general public at least), are the numerous Asian MMO’s that are all F2P, and the successful conversion of some Western MMO’s to F2P as well (DDO Online and LoTR Online).

In the MBA program, we would go on and on about incentive structures and how incentives need to be properly aligned with the types of actions they are meant to encourage. For example, if a salesman’s bonus is aligned strictly with some sort of goal in the short term, then he or she will manage to that time period only, either front-loading or delaying revenue recognition in order to meet his or her goals. That might be a common and completely ethical practice, but it is mis-aligned with the organizational goal of accounting accuracy (recognizing revenue in the period it is truly “earned.”) What ends up happening if this situation persists or scales up is that the company has to explain to its banker or shareholders what accounts for seasonality issues in its revenues or earnings; again, probably not a truly unethical thing, but the situation creates some information asymmetry that needs to be dealt with. Read more

Hey friends,

I’ve been pretty slammed this week with real life (that is, non-gaming, non-blog) stuff. But it’s a good kind of busy.

Unfortunately, though, that means less time for the blog this week. There are a lot of things I wanted to write about: some casual titles to keep an eye on, Zynga passing EA in terms of valuation, Facebook blocking LOLApps last week, Minecraft, etc. You know, reading back on that last sentence, I just realized all those topics covered casual games. So it’s funny that the one game that made me update this blog (even if briefly) is a “core” title: Fallout New Vegas.

This actually arrived in the mail last week but because of my real-world busy-ness, I didn’t play it until the weekend. The other reason I delayed playing the title is because I heard there were a ton of bugs in the game. I was hoping the folks at Bethesda or Obsidian might get a patch out there before I actually played it on my XBox. I believe they’ve patched some of the problems on the PC version of the game, but I’ve seen nothing on XBox Live yet.

So I’ll get this out of the way first: yes, my experience with the game has been slow and buggy, but not to the point that it ruins the game. It ruins “immersion,” but not the game itself.

Second, if you didn’t like Fallout 3, I don’t think there’s anything dramatically different in FNV to make you try this game. So save your money.

If, however, you were like me and really enjoyed FO3, then you owe it to yourself to play FNV. To me, if feels like playing a modded experience of FO3 or a huge expansion of the former title. In a sense, that appears to be problematic: I mean, they are charging us gamers full price for what is essentially a re-skinned version of FO3 with modest rule changes. This is not unlike the sort of thing I could download for free on Fallout 3 Nexus. There are some pretty impressive FO3 mods that change a lot of aspects of the vanilla game: FOOK and FWE  are the two primary “re-dos” of FO3. Read more

Below is the second half of my interview with Bob Berry of Uber Entertainment. I had the chance to chat with Bob about lessons he’s learned as an entrepreneur, his advice for persons interested in a gaming career, his thoughts on the the future of the industry, and his appreciation of the gaming consumer community.

The first part of this interview can be found here.

Learning Points

Mark:  Thinking back over your career, including your time here at Uber working on MNC, what are the biggest successes and biggest mistakes that you can point to and say, “Hey, this was a real lesson that I learned, and it helped me as I was building Uber?”

Bob:  Well, one of the biggest things I learned from the first business, Digitalo, was the owners can’t stay in the trenches and do nothing but work on a game. There is a business, and you have to respect the fact that there is a business that needs to be run, and it has its own needs beyond just maintenance. And there’s a responsibility to your employees to make sure that, hey, when this project is done there are other things lined up, or a financial stability that they’re hoping for and want.

Mark:  Stuff in the pipeline, right.

Bob:  So, it was a big failure in Digitalo when we were just bandwidth limited. Everyone was so stuck in the trenches, there was nobody running the business.

Mark:  How large was that company?

Bob:  I think 12, or so, and then we had contractors as well. And that was really ultimately one of the main reasons for having to close up shop was we just didn’t have enough stuff lined up, solid stuff lined up afterwards. So, things have been quite different on Uber. We’ve been very diligent about having a good business first, and that business gives you some security and kind of a foundation to be able to execute a great game.

If there’s always that worry – if every employee was constantly stressed about, “Is the next paycheck going to come? Do they have more stuff lined up?” I think that affects your work, and it affects the quality of your output.

So, we’ve done, I think, a really good job of making sure that there’s a good business foundation underneath Uber to give just a sense of security where the team can come in and do nothing but kick ass all day, which is great. Read more