Do you want the easy answer on how to create great game experiences?

You probably aren’t ready for it – or at least you won’t follow through on what it takes to achieve it. It’s a struggle for me and I’ve been at it for 11 years. Here you go:

Do this:

• Resonate with the player emotionally
• Spark their intrigue with a challenge
• Release them and reward for investment
• Repeat

That’s it. Practice doing this as deeply and as thought provokingly as you can, over and over again, and you’ll eventually achieve a great game. Increase the reach (who) or depth (what) of your craft, brutally, repeatedly, relentlessly. That’s it.

 

I was going to write a post today about what it’s like to lose a close friend and partner.

I find myself repeatedly at a loss for words when I try.  So instead, I am going to post a letter I wrote to his family, with the names trimmed out.

In a nutshell, it’s hard, its weird, its intense then its never really over. A part of you, the part of you that they knew, is gone. The dreams you’d once had and plans you crafted together dissolved in the wind.

I feel incredibly insecure sharing this, but that tells me its only even more important that I share it now. Anyhow…

To R—-, A—- & extended family,

There were two messages that John sent to me just after midnight on Saturday morning. The first involves his scandalous personal approval of the features of my female travel companion and deserves no further mention.

The second was a message to the team to prep a list of what we were going to do this week and post it up for Monday instead of having a meeting. We’d just made plans to hire on another artist to support our art director, Simone, and John told me he was preparing to pull out a keyboard and start composing, saying ’someone who shows no passion has no place in any company you run.’

Those words echoed with me in the following days – but one other message from him rang even louder.

When I was having trouble at Blizzard, John was the one who listened and didn’t judge. When I was eventually fired from Blizzard, John was the second person I called, this time asking him for advice on how I needed to change.

When my girlfriend poisoned herself in my bathroom after drinking too much vodka because she was heartbroken our relationship was falling apart, he told me I did the right thing by flying her back home to be with her mother instead of trying to help fix her myself.

When I started my new career at Riot Games, he taught me how to think in terms of working myself out of the job by looking for replacement.

When I finally decided to take a stab at making a little game and came to him for business advice, he asked me for creative advice, encouraged me and asked if he could be more involved.

When I had to fire a friend, he walked me through the best way to do it, leading my friend to realize for himself that he didn’t really want to be involved and allowed us to remain on good terms.

When my father left me behind after 13 miles of hiking through the desert in the grand canyon and my brother-in-law had to come back from camp and stayed with me till I could walk, he listened to me vent.

When my abusive roommate started threatening me, he offered me a place to stay at his home. When faced with the choice between moving to San Francisco or NYC for an easy, stable job or working a riskier, but remote contract that would let me explore Europe and work on our game, he offered me a place to stay.

Once at his home, he took the time to walk through all of my career troubles and unwind the giant ball of string that made up my history. When I confessed that I was afraid I was autistic, unemotional or perhaps a horrible sociopath, he assured me it wasn’t the case and he even asked his friend Diane, a therapist to talk to me for her opinion.

In the end, he said:

“Alex, the only thing that’s wrong with you is that you think something is wrong with you.”

“I’ve spent my whole life and much time in my guild around the kind of people you are afraid of being. You’re nothing like them – and I’ll be here to remind you of that every week from now till the day I die if you need it.”

With a renewed sense of peace, I felt it was time to explore Europe. At every stop, John lit up, blowing up my phone with places to visit, ideas on where to go and an unsolicited itinerary that I promptly ignored at every stop.

I never wanted to read them when he sent them and now I’m here on the flight to NYC, weeping and wishing that I could have just a few more hours to talk about nonsense or just listen to him berate me for not shacking it up with the pretty girls I met on my travels.

This feels like a horrible insult to say to you two, who have lost someone who’s been there your whole lives, but while he was my business partner and mentor at times, he became the emotional replacement for the father I didn’t know I needed.

I can only hope that someday someone thinks of me half as strongly when I pass. That maybe, just maybe, the work I do will touch someone as profoundly or personally.

Once upon an eve, John mentioned he wanted to ask Alexia to help with composition and asked me how I felt about the matter. After a quick joke about realizing his nepotistic dream island empire, I told him: “I’ve met both your daughters and you do them a disservice if you worry for a minute I think they aren’t qualified to help out without you suggesting it.”

A—, R—, I don’t know what you want to do next. I don’t expect anything of you; but strangely enough, I have an unexpected opening for a producer, a music lover, a play-tester and a friend.  If either of you would like to join with me and continue this journey and learn what little bits I know, I’d be overjoyed to have you.

If not, know that I expect nothing and genuinely treasure our relationships. Whether it was talking for hours on the phone with Alexia about games – or usually absolutely nothing – or eating with Rayna as she felt conflicted about whether to take the risk to tell a certain boy she wanted to be more than friends. I have greatly enjoyed all of these memories that you’ve brought into my world.

Alex asked me for the financial details of our project. I gave him the rough outline in Facebook, it was a lot of promises and not enough paperwork for future plans. There’s no replacement for good friends. I’ll tell you what I told John at the beginning. Games are risky, games are crazy, games are a lot of hard work, full of uncertainty and they don’t always succeed.

We both decided to get involved in this because it would be fun to do. John figured out the point where were we could make it work and believed wholeheartedly that with his expertise we could make it far, far bigger in scope than anything I’d imagined.

Now, that might be impossible without him, but I’m going to take it as far as I can without regrets. I’ve chosen this crazy life and don’t expect anyone else to understand 🙂

I hope all is well with you guys and I hope you guys choose to get back in touch again someday, whatever the reason.

-Alex

Things had smoothed out in the later patches of the Burning Crusade. Ember storm improved the cast time of Incinerate to push it above Shadow Bolt for Destruction, a number of bug fixes and range increases made life better for drain spells and preparation began for Wrath of the Lich King.

With the conclusion of Sunwell, the WoW team began promoting internally and bringing on new faces to take on the ambitious challenges that awaited us in Northrend.

A Change of Path

Things were not going as well in my own career. After having spent an expansion working on exterior content for the most part, I had started working with the WoW Tools team on dramatically rebuilding the tools that were used to create the game world. The first project, the Spell Editor, had been a fairly solid success, so Scott Mercer took a step back and asked me to take point on the new spawn editor, with Alex Afrasiabi periodically supervising.

Unfortunately, I handled some sensitive situations poorly with the engineer involved. We would later toast each other for setting our personal careers back by about three years when we finally made up during the Cataclysm launch. Either way, I was reassigned back to wildlife spawning for the remainder of the launch.

Shoveltusk. Lots and lots of Shoveltusk

Unlike the spawning of quest POI (points of interest), Wildlife spawning is an act of mass production. Back then, it wasn’t possible to even copy and paste monsters into the world, let alone link-up common behaviours quickly. Each point had to be placed by hand.

I don’t know how much you know about me, but for a person who relishes self-expression and creativity, there was no personal hell greater than massive and laborious spawning projects, full of regular maintenance work, with very few opportunities for self-expression – not because they don’t exist, but because the sheer scale of the world and the clunkiness of the tools makes it very, very difficult.

I think Jeff wanted to motivate me to be clever and dramatically improve the tools; but after having damaged that relationship, it was much harder to get changes made. Likewise, the engineers were already heavily trapped under the weight of the previously agreed-upon requests.

Insecurities and Inquiries

So it was a huge surge of anxiety and fear that coursed through my veins when I was asked to come to the office of Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton for a private meeting. While I’d interacted with both of them regularly, it was never behind closed doors. Convinced my career was over, I walked in and sat down, hands trembling and shaking as I immediately blurted out apologies for whatever it was I had done, but that I had no idea why I was there *today*.

They both stared blankly at me. Tom put on goofy smile.

TC: “Uhm… this isn’t a disciplinary meeting…”

Me: “It’s… not?”

Jeff: “No.”

TC: “We are calling in all of the designers. We want your feedback on an important decision for the game.”

Jeff: “Specifically, we have three options for the Hero class we want to add to the game.”

TC: “Because everyone’s gotta get behind this decision, we wanted everyone’s opinion.”

Me: “Oh…. oh! What are the choices?”

TC: “Death Knight, Rune Master and Necromancer.”

They went briefly into the pitches for each.  The Death Knight would basically be Arthas, but with a focus on tanking magical damage.  The Rune Master would be a leather wearer who has a unique power source where different runes could activate different abilities and empower martial arts moves.  The Necromancer would raise the undead and send them at enemies like waves.

Me: “Wow, those are some pretty significant choices.”

Jeff: “Yeah… so what’s your choice.”

TC: “And more importantly, why?”

Me: “Well, while at first the feeling of saying Necromancer and DK really match the theme of the expansion… I feel like the most important aspect of class design is mechanical diversity. The rune system sounds significantly different and would change how people think about their abilities.”

Me: “Necromancer… well, it seems like it would be a good class, but it’s already been done and stomps HARD on the same gameplay space as the Warlock.”

Jeff: “But the Necromancer could have many pets – or guardians at once instead.”

Me: “True. But in the same vein, we could also just create a version of Warlock with multiple pets and maybe a lot of little summons. It would hit the same notes and clash hard with their design space.”

TC: “What about Death Knight? It seems a clear fit for this expansion. In fact, I can’t imagine another expansion where Death Knight fits better.”

Me: “Fair. However, they have always been aligned pretty damn evil – how you get them into the Alliance is a pretty tough question. But again, still a cool class. Also, I question if we need another plate tank right now.”

TC: “Well, Tank is the most underserved role right now. There aren’t enough of them.”

Me: “The path I would take would be to encourage more classes to be tanking and handling monsters, but yeah, that makes sense. Tanking is a hard job and it puts a lot of pressure and spotlight on one person. It’s hard.”

Jeff: “Well, thanks for your thoughts.”

Me: “Sure. I think DK and Necromancer fit the expansion, but I wouldn’t let the potential for an awesome game mechanic get passed up. Put my vote down as Rune Master.”

A few weeks later, they called the team together for a few announcements.  First off, the new class was going to be “Death Knight” – it would be using a Rune-Based power system, raised ghouls as minions – and that new promoted Cory Stockton would be taking point on the new class.

Foundations

Spawning was still rough work, though things got more interesting when Alex Afrasiabi came in and asked me to bring some specific POIs to life – a great topic for another blog post – but much of the work was still pretty mundane.

So it was a huge breath of fresh air when Cory Stockton came in to my office one morning to ask me for help.

Cory: “Blizzcon is coming up soon and I really want to Dazzle the players with some awesome abilities.”

Me: “Whoa!! That’s awesome.”

Cory: “Yeah! Anyways, I barely know the spell system and scripting is not my forte. I’ve been playing around with stuff for a while, but I just can’t figure some stuff out.  Can you help me?”

Me: “Of course!!”

Cory: “Great. I already have some slashes and stuff. I just need you to make two abilities for me. “

Me: “Just… two?”

Cory: “Yeah! See there isn’t a lot of time to show off abilities in the reveal video, so I just want a couple done. I already made a spell that spawns ghouls, so that’s done.”

Me: “Okay, that makes sense. What do you need?”

Cory: “Well, first off, we know we want the DK to be a caster tank. However, taunting a caster sucks. They just stand there. You can’t reposition them. So I want you to make a spell that teleports them to the Death Knight.”

Me: “Just… teleports them in front of you.”

Cory: “Yeah. If you have a problem with that, go talk to CK, he is working on a spell like that for Warlocks.”

Me: “Okay… what else?”

Cory: “Did you play Warcraft 3?”

Me: “I loved it.”

Cory: “I feel like we need Army of the Dead.”

Me: “Whoa! That’s awesome. Have you figured out what i will do yet?”

Cory: “Nah. For this I just want it to be nostalgic and super flashy. Can you handle that?”

Me: “You got it.”

Sidebar: Death Knights and Warlocks

At this point, you might be wondering why I’m spending a whole post devoted to how Death Knights came to be. The answer is because it was an important turning point in WoW class design. As an AoE casting, pet summoning, ally resurrecting, evil class, Death Knight was a huge risk of making Warlock gameplay obsolete.

The Grip of Fear

Using the Dwarf Death Knight – the only model finished at the time – I set out to create a flashy, epic intro for Army of the Dead. Using  the generally forgotten “SpellCastOmni” animations, I made the DK hold his arms up in the air.  Then using some techniques I’d learned while creating Nightbane, I made invisible missiles fire at the ground, each one summoning a skeleton.

This didn’t feel like enough; using the beam technology created by Dan Reed, one of my favorite programmers in this industry, I created arcs of lighting that struck the ground. This was getting somewhere. I called in Cory.

Me: “Cory, I really like where this is going, but to do much more, it’s going to need some art.”

Cory: “Art? Don’t worry, I got you covered.”

Cory only said this to me three times in our career. The result was the DK VFX, Destructible Buildings for Wintegrasp and the support needed to finish the visuals and quests for the Pet Battles feature of the game in MoP.

Needless to say, the result was great. Terrie Denman, a talented prop artist stepped up, made some new beam textures to match the undead purple eruptions. The animation team upgrade all of the ghoul models into the game to dig themselves out of the ground when spawned and the programming team fixed a number of de-sync issues that causes ghouls to appear above ground for a for a frame on the client.

The result was fantastic.  Chilton came by while we were looking at it.

TC: “This is great…. but what does it DO?”

Me: “uhm….”

TC: “Cory?”

Cory: “Uh, well, it sends in a lot of minions. Maybe you can tank for them. Your own private army.”

TC: “…”

Cory: “…”

Me: “Maybe we just flip that one around backwards. What if we gave them 1 hp each – and then they taunt any monsters nearby. Kind of a Death Knight AoE taunt.”

TC: “Huh. That’s kind of crazy, but give it a try.”

Me: “Alright.”

TC: “… by the way, we *are* giving them Death Coil, right?”

Cory: “Of course!”

Me: “Wait, what?”

This had its own set of problems, which we resolved by renaming the Warlock spell, but that’s a story for another time. I set my attention on figuring out the problem of the caster-taunt. But first, I had to understand the nature of the new Warlock spells and why they were being made.