In 3 parts on YouTube:

I wish I hadn’t made my post on the future of the living room so huge, burying Valve on page 4. I suddenly have the desire to update the picture with a companion cube submarine emerging from the depths between the Apple and Google ships. Here’s why we should all take Valve seriously: They are insanely efficient at leveraging their small size.

Valve has the sharpest outlook on how a software/services platform should be run in the game industry. Despite being a small company at around 300 employees, Steam is dominant on the PC. Michael Abrash’s recent post illuminates how Valve is optimized around delivering maximum value per employee. Valve’s 300 is more directly effective than, say 300 of the people working on the next Xbox (efficiency #1).

They also fly the flag of open platforms and direct access to customers. They believe (as I do) that connecting developers to customers as seamlessly as possible will create the best experiences and ultimately the best platform. Oppressive certification is a waste and a platform hindrance. TF2 is a massively better business on Steam than it ever was on the 360. That direct connection creates an efficient platform, which requires less scale on Valve’s part (efficiency #2).

An open platform device doesn’t have to be as complex and monolithic as an Xbox or an iPad. The graphics hardware race is largely irrelevant on anything that’s not mobile these days. Valve is capable of taking PC components, putting them in a box, and using Steam as an OS* (efficiency #3).

An open platform device doesn’t need a huge launch with a massive marketing push. Forget retail. Valve is big on market experiments and I can see them putting out a Steam box in a bare-bones version 1.0. From there they will learn, iterate and scale up (if the market supports it). It’s an antithetical strategy for a hardware platform launch, but it’s gospel for a software platform launch (efficiency #4).

The thing about the next generation is, it’s going to be much more about software and services than hardware. Valve is in a great position to disrupt the big players purely by virtue of their dedication to open platforms. Not to mention, they understand the importance of a good controller to the living room experience, something I’m not sure even Apple gets, what with their undying devotion to the all-powerful touchscreen.

I once made the mistake of expecting Steam to take over and disrupt the PC market overnight. I was right in my predictions but utterly wrong on the time scale. If anyone can do this, it’s Valve. Just understand, it’s going to happen on Valve Time.

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* Most games currently on Steam use DirectX, which is part of Windows. Valve (including Gabe himself) are working on a Linux port of Steam – Why? There is probably a solution to the DirectX issue either by either launching their Steam Box without the DirectX titles, or by using a networked Windows PC (already running Steam) to render those games over the network back to the Steam Box.

So what’s the selling point? Certainly Sony can’t put out a $900 PS4 and expect anybody to buy it on the back of “MOAR GRAPHICS.”

Next Gen will be defined by the declining retail market more than anything else. MS/Apple/Sony understand that they are making a platform for digital content delivery, not just big AAA games, but also small XBLA games, free to play games, social games, but potentially more importantly: TV and Movies. A new way of interacting with your tv and games, that’s the selling point.

Apple is doing this which means MS and Sony need to strike preemptively or be disrupted. Believe it or not, there are lots of people that would happily never own another “game box” if their TV played Wii Sports and Just Dance. The PS2/Wii era market penetration is the realm of iTV.

I work on AAA games so please don’t remind me that AAA blockbusters aren’t going away. I know, I know. I like those games too. Yes, we will always have them and they will get more uber in the future. It’s great.

But that’s not the highest end of the market. The highest end is $100/month TV & Movie subscriptions that people currently pay to the likes of Comcast and Verizon. The highest end of the games market is not even Mondern Warfare 3′s Billion Dollars, it’s WoW’s Several Billion Dollars.

The next gen is about making and owning the living room software & services platform. Look at how well Apple and Google have done on the backs of iOS and Android. Everybody wants to do that in the living room. The competition is not between Xbox 720 and PS4, the competition is between:

- iTV
- Xbox Live
- PSN
- Google TV
- Steam (which is remarkably well positioned to be relevant in the living room)

Platforms. That is what matters and is what will define the next gen. The level of uncertainty around the future of those platforms is far more terrifying to me than “how much RAM will the box have?”

1. Iwata’s Keynote was about a crisis for Game Developers. My Translation: Nintendo is the one in crisis. Everybody on Facebook and iOS is doing just fine. Yet, Nintendo can’t follow up the blue ocean strategy of the Wii with another Wii – it’s a red ocean now with Kinect, Move on the motion control side and lots of new competitors (Smart TV, cloud gaming, iOS) coming on the cheap disruptive side. Still, they clearly recognize the problem and that’s the first step towards finding a way to make a Nintendo machine part of the future living room.
2. Google recognizes the fact that control and therefore UX is a big problem in the living room. Well Done! Then, they point to tablet and smartphone touchscreens as the solution. Oops! As I mentioned in the bigger article, touchscreens lack tactile feedback, and so they can’t be eyes-off controllers. I don’t think people want to give up on-the-big-screen UI’s and spend all of their time looking down instead of actually watching a show while they surf for something else. Plus, the larger market of apps (as a device selling point) is only enabled by a controller that can navigate on the big screen. Despite being first to market with the most fully featured Smart TV platform, Google is leaving the door open for somebody else to build the great controller experience. This puts Microsoft in a great position. A “Kinect TV” product (cheap, focused on great TV UX and an open app market) could be huge. That is, if Microsoft can bring themselves to put up an open app store.
3. With my favorite bit of news, Valve announced “Big Screen Mode” for Steam, which makes my longshot scenario of a Steam-enabled Boxee 2 much less of a longshot. Big Screen Mode also features a controller-enabled UI. Very soon you’ll be able to hook a cheap PC up to your TV, buy Modern Warfare 2 for less than it costs on any console and play nearly the exact same experience. Steam has more disruptive potential than anybody is giving them credit for. Already, Super Meat Boy, a game designed for controllers, sold more on Steam than Xbox Live Arcade. I tweeted Boxee telling them to hook up with Steam, so we’ll see if they can recognize their leverage to crush Google, Apple and Microsoft, and dominate the living room.

DISCLAIMER: This is a speculative opinion piece based on public information. These opinions are my own and do not represent my employer.

The game industry is about to get flipped. The console in the living room has long been the king platform for games, but these days the living room is different. Only blockbusters like Call of Duty or breakout indies profit in the arms race of the AAA. The traditional games business as a whole is shrinking.

The old console cycle of simply iterating on graphics hardware is dead, and it’s never coming back. Nobody is sure what the next game box will look like. What’s more, Apple TV and GoogleTV are trying to bring some of the magic of Android, iOS, and the Web into the living room and are threatening to upend the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the process.

Game consoles are primed to be disrupted, and the next generation of Smart TV might just be the new champion.

Where We Stand

There is massive growth happening in the games industry on smartphones, Facebook, the Web, and Steam. That style of game product – digitally distributed, service oriented, focused on ongoing revenue – is bound for the living room.

When they get there, an app store will meet the realities of couches and big screen TVs and a very peculiar new box will be born. This new box will have a fancy controller, sort of like a game controller, and it will happen to play games, but it won’t be an Xbox or a Playstation.

It’s not just games that are in for a shakeup, there is a full on war brewing in the living room around access to video content. There are Smart TVs like those from Samsung, there’s Roku and Boxee, and the old giants like Comcast and Verizon are getting smarter about the services they offer. The Web and services like Hulu and Netflix are changing TV behavior forever.

Google and Apple that are the most interesting contenders because they are big and don’t keep content out like the game console manufacturers. In this respect they are open. What also makes them interesting is that games will be important part of their arsenal in this battle and that will pit them against Microsoft and Sony’s AAA firepower.

It certainly doesn’t look good for games in the short term – the traditional business is in decline. But, once the dust settles and the new living room app store reigns supreme, this new box could be incredible for the game industry. Read on for the full analysis:

Where We are Going

The current console cycle has passed it’s 5 year mark and is getting a little long in the tooth. Away from the living room, very interesting things have been happening around the App Store, Steam, Facebook, and the resulting indie games boom. Open development and frictionless downloading have proven to be fruitful.

To Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, an app store model is not attractive. The race to $1 apps terrifies them. Too bad for them that their current model won’t support growth.

A low-power app box that is sold for profit (the Apple model) will have a hundred times as much content as a high-power box sold at a loss (the likely PS4). The old game industry console will get trumped by a great set of services and a great user experience – an app store in the living room that works and makes app management effortless. The decline in the PC graphics card race means that the gap in graphics capabilities will be negligible. There will be very little reason for anyone, even gamers, to prefer a PS4 over what is coming.

The Smart TV Revolution will be like the Smartphone Revolution (but different)

You might think that cable providers are in the same position that the old phone carriers were in in the smartphone revolution. They are primed to be disrupted by great software, UX, and open market apps. But, the apps won’t be the same for Smart TV. Try this thought experiment: Item Sales (call it DLC, MTX, or in-app-purchase if you like) is a massive growth business model in games everywhere. What if TV had the same option?

• Watch a free HBO show and one-click sub to the rest of the season (then select an option for a special collectors DVD to be mailed to your house).
• Instantly pay NBC $5 to make this season of The Office ad-free and available for streaming when you are available.
• That TV ad for an iPod can be clicked, taking you to the Apple store right there on your TV.

If iPhones were the smartphone revolution, this is the true potential of Smart TV. Apps on Smart TV will be nothing like apps on smartphones. Apps on phones do things. When you’re out and about you need “an app for that” so you can get a thing done and move on. When you’re ass-deep in the couch you don’t want to do things, you want to be engaged in great content. Apps on Smart TV will be about making content convenient and social.

That may not sound as revolutionary as apps on smartphones, but when you consider the variety and complexity of content available in the living room (TV, News, Movies, DVR, Internet, Games), it becomes clear how much convenience and control actually matter. Smart TV services will be the difference in getting TV content owners to unclench and leap into the future where they will make more money.

There will need to be a standard of interaction – an iOS for the TV. This open standard will attract the best software, and the customers will follow, much like how apps sell iPhones. Apple and Google have the experience in OS building and app focus that can define a new standard of interaction with TVs.

But, wait a second, what do games even have to do with Apple TV or GoogleTV? Why don’t they just skip games all together? It’s possible they will, but if they manage to build a great user experience (UX) for Video, Apps, and their conflation in Smart TV, it will be a great user experience for games as well. The couch is an even better place for games than your phone or PC. Games will dominate living room app stores even more than they do on mobile and the web.

Next Page: The Winning Recipe

I’ve got a twitter account which will probably be rarely used, so you’ve got that alternative to the RSS. I’ll tweet out any new content that shows up here.

For posterity, here’s the previous site design. I liked the header and background, but I wanted something cleaner here, and I wanted a wide format so I can ditch the lightboxes.

The papercraft style treatment is ripped from a radial gradient tutorial I saw on the web, but I used it a differently for this logo.

The next one here is from a little hobby of mine. I keep a list of names for my super awesome game development studio that I’m going to start after I make my first billion. One name near the top is Überifica.

Based on Black Slabbath, the pixel-block nature of the Ü letterform will make a great icon. In the middle is my favorite color treatment, and the bottom is a little retro tribute to the demo scene.

On Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, one of the first things we did was work on the logo. We had to because the game had been announced before we ever started working on it. We did the logo so early on that the marketing team and executives couldn’t even be sure of the final name of the game. They knew that they wanted it to shorten to “WAR,” thus the “Age of Reckoning” bit. But, they weren’t positive that “Warhammer ONLINE: Age of Reckoning” wouldn’t become WOAoR, which is a really stupid name. So, the first logo I did was using this name:

There are two bits of work that survived to the end from this. First, I used the shield and hammer from the Warhammer rulebook to anchor the logo, after giving them a repaint. Second, I repainted the classic WARHAMMER logotype to lessen the color contrast and give it a more textured, tangible look. Here you can see a before and after:

Later on, when we saw that the marketing folks had done a “final” logo, we took it and did another polish paint pass on it. At this point they had decided to add “ONLINE” back in, so I repainted that bit as well as the “Age of Reckoning” text. Michael Phillippi did a final pass on the shield and hammer, as well as painting the awesome Chaos axe to go along with it. Thus, the final logo:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Then watch the original of the clip I remade:

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428

And here is my version:

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

This was so much fun to make. I did it in a few lunch hours, I didn’t stop to change something if it was crappy looking, and I worked as furiously fast as I could. It was probably 3-4 hours start to finish. I know it looks like crap, but that’s kind of the idea with Star Wars: Uncut – having fun and rediscovering your love of Star Wars.

Nick LaMartina here at Mythic did the audio, which I think makes the whole thing work.

UPDATE:

A second clip. This one was not as much fun as the first to make (and not as successful), but still good practice for embracing the spirit of prototypes. I’m hoping this “quick and dirty” spirit will spill over into my game dev. We often learn a lot more about what works and what doesn’t by doing. Once again, Nick went above and beyond with the audio.

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 206 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

And an update:

We needed to do a ground up redesign of the UI in 6 months (it turned out to be more than 8). The UI for an MMO like WAR is a huge piece of the game, almost like an OS for the game. Beyond the HUD (which is very complex in itself) it has maps, chat, mail, a social network, maybe 50 windows total. . . basically everything you would find on Xbox Live and more.

The reason I enjoyed this gig was because I had the opportunity to come up with original features. One that made it into the game was the Open Party system. Players in WAR can see a list of groups sorted by distance, and just join up with them in one click. This makes playing WAR’s open RvR gameplay much simpler because you can find people nearby who are playing the way you want to play, be it fighting other players or fighting monsters.

I think there is a lot more we could have done with this system, and there are arguments to be made that it actually reduces community stickyness in the long term, but I think it’s a huge improvement over the old LFG standard, and a step in the right direction. This kind of functionality is a big interest of mine going forward – how do we take players playing cooperatively and help them form longer-term connections? Are open guilds the next logical step?

The process for building the new UI went like this:

Phase 1: HUD Sketching

My first step was to lay out the main HUD – the things you see on screen at all times. I sketched their shape and put them together in several “wireframe” layouts that looked like this:

These wireframes served several purposes:

• They were quick to make and remake
• The elements could be positioned in lots of different ways to see what worked and what didn’t (it’s in this phase that all MMO UI designers discover that there are a lot of good, undeniable reasons behind WoW’s UI layout, and despite all of our best efforts, unless our gameplay is fundamentally distinct, our UI’s will look somewhat similar).
• The wireframes could be shown to producers for approval. We didn’t get many change requests, but this buy-in bought us some armor for later on.

One goal of mine was to keep the UI seperated into chunks. Earlier iterations of our UI had looked like a more integrated “dashboard.” The modular approach gave us several benefits:

• We could build modability into the game. Instead of needing to download UI mods, users could move their UI around into whatever layout they wanted inside the game.
• One of these options could be to add tons of hotbars – one of the first things advanced MMO players want to do.
• We could start the game off with lots of things hidden (we are still getting this in). New players would see a very very simple UI, while elder players could show as much complexity as they liked.

My biggest challenge here was trying to keep all of our progress bars from competing visually. In most MMO’s you gain XP. In WAR we have XP, Renown, Influence, Victory Points, Morale, and some classes have a combat mechanic that fills up over time. . . yikes.

The other major challenge was groups. In WAR you will often find yourself in a Warband with 23 other players, which can look like this:

We made it look like that because it’s good to keep tabs on all of those people if you are playing in a highly organized Guild. It’s also good if you are a healer and you need to know if somebody is dying. But, most people don’t give a crap about all of that information, they just want to know how many people they are grouped with and if they are dead or not. I think we could have done better with this by keeping more clutter off the screen and offering the option to “show all.”

There is also something clunky with the quest tracker and all of the event announcements we do (things like achievements and “You Have Entered:” messages).

There’s way too much information presented for it to be interesting, but I’ve never been able to settle on a solution that works elegantly. I think there’s something to be found in news feeds, fading information over time, and separating the information by the icons we use in the main menu:

Phase 2: HUD Design

After settling on the wireframe layout, I worked my way around the screen texturing all of the individual elements and giving them detailed designs. By mocking up every possible state of the object I gained two valuable things. The mockups were both a detailed functional design and all of the art assets needed. I would put these mockups together into documents that we could give to programmers and to producer-types for final approval.

After we wrapped on the HUD, that same process rolled right into all of the windows. Here is a smattering of some of the mockups I did:

There were some interesting tasks that came up during all of this. I made a custom font for our player names, called Age of Reckoning.

I developed the style for our maps and a workflow that allowed us to cheat and complete 30+ of them very rapidly.

Here’s an early mockup that I’m also fond of, I think it captured a nice warhammer feel:

There was a metric assload of tiny icons to draw. There were probably 20 artists who pitched in on the various sorts of icons.

The UI touches all aspects of the game, so it was a great education in MMO game design. Everything from the second-to-second flow of combat in the action bars to the months-long metagame of the campaign was under our noses:

I had some other pet features that never made it in (we only had 6 months!), but I’ll restrain myself from posting them publicly. Ask me sometime about the quick commands ;)

That’s the overview of my role in the team as the hybrid designer/artist. There were a lot of fine programmers working with us, as well as Terro Veun, the other UI artist, and Carrie Gouskos, the UI lead. Given what we were up against, I am extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish.

This was a painting for Dominance War 4, an art competition for game artists. I’ve been so busy with UI, that this is the first painting I’ve done in a few months.

Everything Rests on the Core Loop

Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions the player will perform over and over again in the heart of gameplay. The core loop of Gears of War might be: 1) Encounter bad guys and take cover 2) Move to a good attack position 3) Kill the bad guys using a selection of your weapons 4) Re-arm and move on.

Everything else – vehicles in a shooter, dialogue in an RPG, cutscenes, minigames, QTE’s, set-pieces, traversing an empty environment, etc – it’s all pacing for the core loop. If any of these elements were solid enough to stand on their own, they would be their own genre. Sometimes they are, like vehicles in a driving game, but often they aren’t, like dialogue or QTE’s.

Every other aspect of the game – the art style, the story, the amount of content – everything needs to gel with that core loop. We talk about an elegant alignment of features as the key to creating a sublime play experience. The core loop is your initial axis to align to.

It doesn’t matter what else you have figured out, if you don’t know what your core loop is, you are up a creek. If you are spending all of your pre-production time figuring out what the story for your game is, the marketing plan, the art style, but you don’t know what your core loop is; STOP. Figure out what your core loop is first.

A great shortcut is to steal somebody else’s. This is how most games get kicked off. Developers borrow the core loop from their previous game or somebody else’s. But, be careful, because now you have to over-deliver on every element surrounding your derivative gameplay so that you somehow elevate the total experience. Minor twists on proven core loops can work, but they can also backfire. It’s best to figure out which situation you’re in as early as possible.

In non-linear games you also need to consider the mission loop. In MMOs this is the quest loop. It will usually include several iterations of the core loop. RPGs are an exercise in mission loop trumping core loop.

A great core loop with supporting features is what creates a wonderful, “flow” experience. Know your core loop, it is the soul of your game!

Design to your Constraints

Can it be done, done easily, and done well? Don’t propose features that push the technology in ways it won’t easily go. You only get one or two of those features a game and chances are you aren’t the guy who gets to make those bets. Instead, understand your tech and the capabilities of your programmers. How much money, time and people have you got to spend? Is your design worth it?

This sounds like common sense, but these constraints are moving targets, and this is exactly what makes design a important skill and not blue-sky, schoolboy-daydream, tighten-up-the-graphics-on-level-three, wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if, bull crap. The farther along you are in production, the more you must design to your constraints.

There is the rare occasion, late in a product’s development, where a risky new feature is worth it. Sometimes you don’t know your game until then and its impossible to come up with those brilliant ideas before you do. But that is a rare gem. When you’re working on a game day to day, you have to design to your constraints to get anything done. The best designers on the job are proposing 10 easy wins to every risky bet, and most of those easy wins are directly touching the core loop.

Games are often designed incrementally, through thousands of little decisions that result in little improvements. Designing to your constraints will get you down the path to a fun game that much more quickly. It’s the job of technologists to loosen these constraints and open up the possibilities, and it is the role of prototyping to cheapen the risks of those big bets that break the constraints.

The basic idea is that the momentum from successes like the Wii and the social games market will focus the device down to a casual, cheap box. It will be like a Wii that runs Xbox Live and has all the great content available on the web (like what XBL has done with netflix). Then, the hardcore crowd can go and buy a plug-in bit that will kick it up a notch and let it run Gears of War 5 in 1080p. The hardcore market has proven in this generation that they don’t mind a fragmented, multiple SKU console with the 360 and PS3.

Pressure from quasi-open devices like the iPhone, open platforms like Facebook, and digital distribution of games in places like Steam will push things in this direction. Somebody is going to realize that if they open up their console and go against the traditional Nintendo model (tight grip on the content, complex certification), they can win. The manufacturer of this box should profit from hardware sales, but also from owning the marketplace. They can take it away from Wal Mart and Gamestop, and I believe they will try.

These are the top three (or 6, depending on how you look at it) books that I’ve returned to after I’ve finished them, and the books with the most to offer to a game artist:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, Beautiful Evidence: Edward Tufte

These 4 books (all studies of the same subjects) have value that is difficult to explain. They are filled with images, and they are about seeing, so it’s better to look at them than to describe them in words. If you find them in a bookstore, pick one up and browse, you’ll know if they’re up your alley. They’ve benefited me with a better instinct in what the player’s eye will catch on, and how to present visual feedback to the player.

Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud

This book is a great at helping you think about player experiences. There is a lot that goes on moment-to-moment inside the players head, and the same goes for comics. A lot can happen for the player in less than a second – especially if you’re talking about the core gameplay loop that you’ve trained him to connect with. That loop becomes this visceral “feel” thing that you can’t really verbalize or express except in gameplay. Understanding Comics will help you get a better grasp on “feel” and what it’s made of.

Plus, it’s a great summary of comics as an art form, which leads us to:

The Illusion of Life: Frank and Ollie

The best summary of visual storytelling as an art form. I’ve got the out-of-print original of this book (lots of extra chapters on Disney studios and specific animators). When making art for games, you have to constantly make decisions about where to spend your time – what aspects of the visual presentation that will matter most to the player. Frank and Ollie give you an understanding of “The Illusion of Life.” This is the oft discussed “believability” or “suspension of disbelief.” Frank and Ollie are the guys who figured this out in the first place for the realm of moving pictures. This is the principle you must constantly apply in deciding where to put your paint.

This is also a foundational book on animation techniques. All of these books focus on topics that are, at best, adjacent to game making. You’ll need to read a lot about things that appear irrelevant, but, thankfully, these are all really interesting topics on their own.

–UPDATE–

I’m only halfway through Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” and I can already tell that it’s the best book on game design ever written. It’s actually the only good one ever written, in my opinion, but it’s a pretty difficult subject to write about, and Jesse’s book is comprehensive. So, well done, Jesse!