Vol.
2, Issue 1
November 10, 1999
Beaker's
Bent:
Beaker's Back
by
Rich "Beaker"
Wyckoff
t’s
been quite a few months, but loonygames is back, and Beaker’s
Bent is back with it. To anyone who might be a regular reader,
welcome back. And to those of you who are reading this column
for the first time, let me use this first of a new series of Bents
to explain a few things about the column. I’m a professional
game designer and started my career at Looking Glass Technologies
just after their golden years when they released Ultima Underworld
I and II and System Shock. Looking Glass was a company
that never had to make wild proclamations about the importance
of design as has become the vogue among recent startups because
every person in the company at that time was so strongly steeped
in game design that it just went without saying that design would
be the first priority.
I was
lucky enough to spend my first couple of years in the industry
in this environment. Even though during that time the company
came close to collapse and many recently hired people such as
myself found themselves without jobs and without any projects
as significant as LG’s first set of successes on their resume,
everyone who spent time in that environment came out of it with
strong ideas about and experience with game design and development
that I have come to realize are far from common in the industry.
I next
spent nearly two grueling years on the famous failure known as
Trespasser and since this spring have been at Knowledge
Adventure, working on an Unreal engine project which is
still unannounced and which I probably won’t be able to discuss
for some months yet. In these post-LG years, though, I have gathered
ample evidence that it is design, pure and simple, that determines
the success of a project. Well-designed games can still fail,
of course, and though traditionally developers mistrust or even
loathe marketers, I am well aware that marketing plays a key role
in the eventual monetary success of a game. However, even great
marketing cannot sell a horribly unfun game or one which has such
a poor design that it is impossible to even ship it.
The first
run of Beaker’s Bent contained a mixture of discussions of
design philosophy and critiques of industry trends. This will
remain the trend for the new run of the column. I have been doing
a fair amount of reading about business and design since loonygames
went on hiatus, so hopefully I’ll be able to bring in some
published justification for many of the ideas I have been fixated
on since entering the industry. I believe that the new Bent will
consist of much shorter entries than the old columns, however.
I think this will make it easier for me to get them in on time
as well as less overwhelming for the average reader to wade through!
In this
new spirit of brevity, I’m going to end this re-introductory
column here. For the many who wrote responses to my Baldur’s
Gate column, which I hadn’t really intended to be on
display for so many months while the site was on hiatus, I apologize
for not being able to respond to all of your letters. Now I finally
know what it is like to have more correspondence than you have
time to deal with. I also need to state that though I seem to
be the only member of the Trespasser team who is publicly
accessible, I really don’t have anything more to say about
that game. There are wild rumors floating around on the net which
people keep asking me about, but I have not worked at Dreamworks
for an entire year and I have no inside information about or interest
in anything Trespasser related. The team has moved on as
has the industry and most of the gameplaying public, so it is
time to bury those dinosaurs once and for all.
-
Richard “Beaker” Wyckoff is a game designer, not a level
designer, damnit!
