Pick your Passion
Longtime readers of the blog may remember a very early post about scope in video game design. You start with all the ideas in the world, and then you see which ones you can make easily, which ones are worth sweating to fit into the game, and which ones aren't worth the effort required to implement, either because you simply don't have the resources to do it, or because you could do it, but then you'd ship in five years, and you need to ship in (some time measurement with a number and a period of time that would get me fired for saying it), or, really, because nobody was willing to schedule the meetings, send the e-mails, barge into people's offices, and fight the fight to get that feature in.

My computer has old files, documents about characters, story arcs, environments, combat mechanics. If I sort them by date and open up the oldest, it's like a trip down memory lane. Oh, hey, that was where the story was gonna take place! Aw, that combat rule system I really thought would make it. Wow, in retrospect, that follower was never going to be good.

So much gets cut. It's the only way that anything gets made. You aim high, and then you run like hell for the target until one group, be it level art or cinematic design or combat programming, tells you that they absolutely positively can't make it, and something's gotta go. If you're the one saying that, you almost always feel awful, which you may or may not cover with a show of anger that you were ever expected to try for this obviously impossible goal, and you have to justify the fact that you can't hit these goals. If you're not the bottleneck, then you're frustrated that your stuff is being cut by somebody else's workflow, and you try to salvage as much as you can.

There are books and games and comics I've read that I'd love to talk about, but I can't, because they're clearly out of character for me and would make it clear what kind of game we're making. If I mention playing God of War or Ninja Gaiden, that sends as much of a message as casually mentioning that I've recently read Heaven Sword, Dragon Saber, Outlaws of the Marsh, Bridge of Birds, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms might have clued somebody in if I'd been working on Jade Empire a few years back. I remember someone saying that you can learn a lot about a dev's unannounced project by looking at his Amazon wishlist. Right now, given the amount of Indigo Girls and Justice League on mine, that suggests a lesbian superhero game. Maybe I should throw Nintendogs on there just to muddy the waters a little.

I don't have much else to say, except that I wish I had more to say. I'm as much in love with our game today as I was before -- hell, more so, even, as decisions that needed to get made are finally getting made, and we've got a solid course plotted -- but this is definitely the time when you have to justify the things that are precious to you, the things you want to fight for, the things that you love enough to make somebody else do crunch-time to fit in the game.