Speaker: Tom Smith, Creative Manager @ THQ

Vision

• 10,000 ft view: Most high level view you could have. Defines game in way that sets it apart from other games and sets goals for production.
• It’s not just the game in your head… It’s also the game in your player’s head. You need to understand the user experience you are aiming for.

Things that are NOT “Good Vision” statements

• Use cases (tells story of the game)
• Prototypes
• Concept art
• Weaknesses of the above: Only talk about slices of the game, not 10,000 foot view

These are also NOT “Good Vision” statements

• Negatives (this game is NOT an RPG)
• Competitive Products
• Inspirations
• Weaknesses of the above: All kind of vague. Not precise enough

Still more things that are NOT “Good Vision” statements:

• Corporate vision. How your company works.
• Project goals.
• Positioning (platforms, ship date, etc)
• Elevator Pitch (the sales side)
• Razor X (the sales side)
• Feature List
• Unique Selling Point
• Back of Box
• User stories
• Weaknesses: These are more biz/sales/marketing, not DEVELOPMENT. Vision statement is a production tool.

A Good Vision Statement:

• Needs to be communicated within team and outside the team. Make sure everyone is seeing the same game.
• Helps resolve conflicts in an ego-free/positive way: “It’s not part of the vision” instead of “it’s a bad idea”.
• Makes people think about WHY they’re doing what they’re doing – and to think about the project as a whole, not just the task at hand.
• A Good Vision Statement is a Production Tool: It’s a central Statement that defines your game and what makes it stand out.

The Vision Chart:

• 30,000 feet = Vision… The WHY
• Top floor = Feature List, Unique Selling points… The WHAT
• Ground Floor = Prototypes, Feature Designs, Content Design Docs… The HOW
• (NB: There’s one more Floor, but I’m missing it from my notes)

When?

• Start of project
• Post pitch
• It guides preproduction
• It helps you make decisions you’re going to make during Preproduction

Who?

• The team (at least leads)
• Management
• The Publisher… If the relationship can support it.
  • You’ll even want to engage marketing if you can get them on board.
  • Their buy-in is critical. Ideally you can involve them, but it depends…

How?

• Group agreement.
• Brain storm (get it all out)
• Single visionary style vs. democracy. Tom prefers more of a democracy at this point.
• Discuss.
• Argue now so you don’t have to later.
• Have honest and tough conversations.
• As an aside: Even if you can’t get consensus, you identify potential roadblocks down the road when there are disagreements that can’t be resolved.

Sample Vision Statement (Conan)

1. Crush Your Enemies
2. Discipline of Steel
3. (NB: I missed #3-5)

Each point gets at:

• Player feeling
• Feature description
  • Drawn to life – not just a bunch of bullet points. It should express the heart of the game.
  • Or, if there’s a core new feature, then this should be spelled out clearly.
• Unique style/flavor

Example: Leisure Suit Larry

1. Funny – everything else is subordinate to this goal
2. Sexy
3. Varied

• Problem: Needed to address the game play earlier (as #1). Game play was #3 and should have been prioritized above Funny.

Wording

• Precise: Get at the heart of what the game is trying to do. Should not use jargon or inside references.
• Concise: Boil it down to as few words as possible so it can be easily digested and remembered.
• Positive: Say what the game IS, not what the game ISN’T.
• Evocative: “Crush your enemies” was a great example of something that evokes the feeling the Conan team was going for.

List Carefully

• Small is good. 3-5 is ideal. Only include the things you CANNOT do without.
• Prioritize the list. Order matters. Know which ones are more important than the others.
• Start with the core experience of the game. What does the player actually do?

Weak Visions

• Hard to interpret: Corporate doublespeak… “Good”, “Mass Market”, “Awesome”, etc.
• Don’t list things all games must do… No bugs, fun, beautiful, positioning.

Example: Hunter the Reckoning

1. “It’s fun to kill things” (too broad and vague)
2. “Want to push the graphics beyond what others are doing” (this is OK because it acknowledges that although graphics are important, it was subservient to goal #1. Combat trumped Art)

Once you have a good Vision Statement, you will need to expand it in order to help explain your vision statement to others:

• Use cases
• Prototypes
• Concept art
• Negative examples
• Competitor products (use specific examples of HOW you’re similar and different)
• Inspirations for flavor. Give a sense of a game that words can’t convey.

Applied Vision: What do you DO with the vision?

• Spread it around.
  • Everyone needs to know it and understand it.
  • Kickoff meeting
  • Show to newbs to the team
  • More than a doc. Not just a link to a wiki. Sit down and talk to them about it. Walk them through it. Especially important to make sure publisher (esp. marketing) are on board. Address misconceptions early on.
  • Keep it visible.
    • Post it on a wall.
    • Reprint in key docs.
    • Creative Spreading (t-shirts, contests, songs, load screens, etc)
      • NB: USEFUL spreading is the key.
  • Application is better than display: Cite the vision statement when making decisions.
• Use it as a filter
  • Assess all major decisions through it… But also all minor decisions, too.
  • Get everyone into that habit.
• Argument Ender
  • It’s often easy to avoid discussions of feasibility vs. fun if you check first whether it fits the vision. You can cull ideas outside the vision before wasting time discussing them.
• Kill Feature Creep
  • Kill ideas politely if they’re not consistent with vision
  • Example: Hunter: The Reckoning. We killed off all RPG elements early on as not part of our game. This let us focus more on the core parts of action combat
• Better Solutions
  • Quickly choose between equally valid paths.
  • Great for Agile development. You iterate to a goal. This helps you decide what should be a part of the next iteration.
• Remove Petrification
  • Gives you a means to reassess and kill ideas.
  • Remove the “sacredness” from sacred cows.
  • Example: Hunter AI. Tried something cool but very complex. It caused a bunch of schedule concerns. Once we got a feel for the combat, we realized we didn’t need the complexity to support the original goal of fun combat.
• Relationship Helper
  • Justify decisions to your publisher (if your publisher is bought in). Remind them that they agreed to the vision so that they can understand your decisions better.
• One Team, One Vision
  • Makes manpower growth/changes easier. Vision lives on and is shared beyond changes in people.
  • Get outsourcers on board quicker.
• Empower the Team
  • People can resolve conflicts alone. They can make better local decisions under time constraints by having a useful decision matrix.
• Thinking Teams
  • More of a mindset than a checklist. Get people thinking about the “Why” questions along the way.

Use it or Lose it

• Applied in these ways, vision can help.
• But if you don’t apply it, don’t bother going through the process.

Micro Vision: Applying Vision to Everything…

• Smaller visions (individual content).
  • When – before detailed designs or prototypes
  • Who – people in the trenches
  • How – meetings and documents
  • Smaller list (not necessarily 3-5 items)

Some examples:

• Variant Visions
  • Not all are like the game vision
  • Focus on the right questions
  • In other words, how do we justify this specific piece of content’s existence in the game
• System Visions
  • Holistic design. Example: Checkpoint System “The goal is to get the player back quickly after death” which can then guide design (frequent saves) and development (load times need to be fast).
  • Enemy/Challenge Design: Player perspective. The flow of content guides the player to different experiences. Example: “The purpose of the Cave Ape is to force player to learn dodge”.
    • Of course, if enemy design wanders, you know what action to take:
      • Either fix enemy so that it does work right
      • Or, find another enemy to teach with
      • Or, cut the feature (dodge)
• Power/Ability Vision
  • Aspirations “why is this gun awesome?” Focus less on the spreadsheet and convey powers in meaningful ways.
  • This also suggests dependencies: If purpose of machine gun is to mow down weak enemies, then provide levels that allow this.

Conclusion: Vision Benefits

• Communication
• Arguments
• Thinking
• Believing

Thinking teams make great games!

Tom Smith: tom.smith@thq.com

Questions:

• What if sequel? Do you still need a vision statement?
  • Want to focus on what will make the new version stand out.
  • But you also need to refer back to previous version Vision
• Is going through vision statement team-wide once per month a good thing?
  • Not sure if the repetitiveness is always a good thing. Depends on culture of the company.
• Localization: Are there issues when you translate them to teams in other countries?
  • Haven’t dealt with that issue a lot. In that case, it would be a challenge. Would take good translation and oversight of both groups.
• What would you do about people who think it’s too “touchy feely”?
  • Give some actual evidence that it has concrete use cases.
  • Reduce amount of wishy-washy language in the vision statement.
• What are conditions where you see vision changing during preproduction?
  • Obviously if you didn’t get it right, then you may need to change it.
  • If you are doing a lot of early prototyping, then you might need to know what the core fun is before you can build a meaningful vision
  • “Bad” cases: Direction from the publisher is changing might require revisions.
• Comment: Additional functionality – it serves as a benchmark for completeness. The functionality isn’t enough. The goal needs to be reached before you check it off.
  • On the publisher side I can evaluate the milestone based on the vision statement and see whether they hit their goal.
• How do you keep people from getting out of control when they come up with new ideas for features that are outside the vision?
  • Vision needs to be locked down. Need to encourage a more formal review process to try and settle down this kind of thing.
• How do you see intersection of vision and scope?
  • Vision sets the conceptual scope, but not the time scope. There are lots of ways to achieve the vision independent of time and budget scope.
• Communicating to outsourcers? How do you make this relevant to them?
  • Are they just completing a task? Not as important.
  • If there’s a long term relationship, then it’s more important to get their buy-in on vision.
• Microvision: Do you have meetings to scope features?
  • If it’s big (like combat system) then you might want to have a multiple point vision generated by multiple stakeholders.
  • Depends also on size of team.
• Comment: “The Giant Monkey is Not Making Me Die…” had to be the best quote from the talk.
  • The audience seemed to agree :)

Tony Van, Executive Producer at Ubisoft San Francisco, presented this session about avoiding a breakdown of communication in game teams. He gave lots of examples, and the following points were made.

The top problem in most organizations is miscommunication. Here are the top ten reasons for miscommunication:
#1 No concept of communication

Understand that communication is EVERYBODY’S responsibility, especially yours.

#2 Unclear goals and priorities

Clear goals state WHY you are doing something, and what is required for success. Be SMART:

Specific (well defined, measurable, prioritized)

Motivated (team wants to achieve it)

Agreed upon (all stakeholders on board)

Realistic (possible with identified resources, knowledge and time)

Trackable (validate performance during completion)

#3 Assuming a definition

Terms are the foundation for discussing and planning.

Document your terms clearly at the start.

Always question term definitions, and get them documented.

#4 No frame of reference

From the beginning, your “vision” requires a clear frame of reference.

Reference helps get everyone on the ‘same page’ fast

• Gives a tremendous amount of context immediately
• Allows discussion of what others like and don’t like
• Mix and match with other references
• Important for original IP’s and franchises alike

#5 What is “good enough”?

Defined “exit criteria” of subjective and creative ideas is difficult but required — major problems come at this time.

Deliverables must use the SMART exit criteria:

• Implementers – how they will achieve their results
• team leads – verify that results are achieved, point out why they are not
• publishers – state why the delivery does (or does not) meet the exit criteria

Subjective deliverables add the following requirements:

• Show it to your target audience for expectation
• Review their feedback
• Iterate to get closer to their expectation of the goal

#6 Someone is “Out of the Loop”

The more people in the loop, the more likely someone is out of the loop.

Three basic methods of clear communication (from The Mythical Man-Month):

• Workbook (formal project documentation)
• Meetings (regular team meetings)
• Informal (face to face, notes, emails, phone calls, etc.)

Communicating a single message, with the means to clarify and update it, helps keep everyone in the loop without effort.

#7 Bottleneck due to chain of command

At the start determine who has the authority for what decisions

• Determine Top Tier stakeholders for goal changes
• Determine Lower Tier stakeholders for goal validations

Clearly communicate cause and effect of delayed/countermanded decisions to Top Tier.

Defined chain of command prevents bottlenecks or “rescinding orders.”

#8 One way communication

We don’t all understand the same way. Be sure your audience is understanding you based on the different ways — learn more about psychology of your team mates. Potentially incorportate things such as the Myers-Briggs personality test into your organization.

Just because you said it/sent it, that doesn’t mean that the message was understood. You must always validate your message.

Learn multiple ways to communicate to maximize your effectiveness.

#9 You’re not listening

Always listen to the other person’s point of view.

Try to communicate in different ways.

Don’t interrupt.

Become a great listener!

#10 Too negative

While the criticism may be true, there are better ways to deliver the message.

Discuss the specific error in the context of course correction.

Focus on improvement.

Be very aware of “priming” (the psychological effect of the environment on people’s reactions). You can turn a negative situation into something much better if you bring the right attitude to the table.