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 The Denki Difference
Our development process is central to everything at Denki. Every system we use in every part of our business is inspired or informed by it in some way.
We recognise it would not have been possible to consistently deliver as many commercial games as we have without it.
It makes the difference between finished and fun; between on time and "ready when it's ready"; between making money and losing money. Quite literally it's been the difference that’s enabled us to continue making games for almost a decade.
Our development process is the key difference that makes Denki what it is - so we've come to refer to it simply as "The Denki Difference".
In my last blog I mentioned two distinct parts of The Denki Difference called “The Way” and “The End”. It seems that the idea of a finished game being The End is generally well understood, but several questions I've received recently about The Way suggested it might be helpful to explain a bit more of the thinking that makes up our development process.
The Importance Of Repeatability
The first thing to note is how malleable it is. Over the years I've encountered companies – development studios and publishers alike – who seem to regard their development process as inviolate. Unchallengeable and unchangeable: it is the way it is, because that is the way things are. So they leave it well alone.
I've come to believe this is usually due to fear; specifically a fear of breaking it and being unable to repeat their success. These companies have often had a hit game, but yet have no understanding of how or why. Their leaders assume the persona of shaman trying to explain why a patient recovered despite mortal infection in the days before scientific reasoning and medicine. In this way the development process is turned in to a dark art, full of superstition and ritual, complete with its high-priests who claim a deeper understanding and insight.
At Denki, we don't believe incantation or blood sacrifice is necessarily the best way forward for our industry (though we keep an open mind). We are much more interested in using scientific method to shine a bright light on this darkest of arts. We will not be satisfied with our own development process until we have full mastery of it - until we can use it to deliver the results we want with near 100% repeatability.
Development processes for any creative media are, by definition, highly creative and it seems to be about this point in precedings that the mysticism creeps in to game development. I think it's fair to say that no one fully understands creativity yet, but that's not a reason to start lighting candles, burning incense and offering praise. Any creative process that doesn't achieve results repeatably and predictably is not a process at all - it's a belief. By postulating, experimenting, testing and revising instead of simply worshiping, Denki aims to be part of the movement that will eventually drag creativity out of the dark ages it has lived in for far too long.
The Demon-Haunted World
I used to assume everyone in our industry wanted to do that, but I've slowly realised that's not the case and that there are plenty of people around who seem perfectly content with the way things are. There are even those who will tell me it's impossible to understand the creative process - that trying to observe and understand it dispels the magic somehow. Nope – sorry, but I disagree. I see the creative process happening around me every day, and it’s definitely not magic, unless it’s the same kind of magic that makes an athlete consistently run a hundred metres in less than ten seconds. That kind of magic I recognise as preparation, focus and tenacity. So I remain firmly with Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan when it comes to observations that require any sort of magical explanations.
I always feel rather sorry for companies with this "leave it as it is" approach, because it suggests nothing's ever going to change for them. Which might be fine, except that the world moves on regardless of our own plans, so standing still is possibly the only strategy guaranteed to be a bad decision. For me at least, being a developer isn't about defending the arcane secrets of creativity we've unearthed at any cost. Instead it's about studying them and applying what we learn so we can, hopefully, get to a point where the creative process can be harnessed in a meaningful way for the benefit of everyone, regardless of the industry they work within.
What I enjoy most about working at Denki is the sheer joy of learning how to be better at what we do every day. Far from assuming we know exactly how things should be done, we assume the opposite. We believe what we're doing is merely good enough to get us by for the moment, until we figure out something better. So we're always searching for better ways of working. That makes The Denki Difference something that's constantly changing - sometimes slowly, sometimes very rapidly - but never static. Change is the only constant there is within The Denki Difference.
So that's some background to The Denki Difference - that's what makes it, and us, tick. But once we'd established that as our aim, the next question was "where do we look for inspiration?" Other games companies are the most obvious choice, but there are far too many examples of games which have ground on and on – and on – either to emerge diluted, fun free and well over budget, or simply never emerge at all. Why is that? We are not unique after all – the games industry is not the only industry that relies on creativity.
There are definitely effective ways to control, manage and schedule creativity. Ways which provide plenty of opportunities for creative input and yet work within fixed constraints and deadlines. However, it's not the games industry where the best examples are to be found – nor even the wider software industry. Many very large scale projects do run to time and budget while requiring significant creative input. As I’ve stated before however, we’re in the entertainment business, so why not look at the entertainment sector for examples? After all, a lot of it has now existed for a century or more, so they’re bound to have come up with a few pointers to get us started, right?
At Denki, our development process is not based on any other games company. It's not based on film or television companies - even the good ones. Instead we've taken our inspiration from magazine publishing. Print magazine. Remember them?
Many of the folks within Denki were utterly fed up hearing the myriad of excuses about why it was impossible to create quality to a deadline. So we sought examples of industries which did precisely that. Magazines are a good one – no, in fact a great one. You know you’re publishing 12 (or more) issues per year. You know - to the day - when each one has to be finished and on the shelf. That instantly puts a limit on how long you have to create something – and it better be higher quality than your competitors too. The great thing about that whole limitation is that it takes a lot of uncertainty out of the equation. There's simply no "well, we could spend another month making it better" discussion to be had. It's either ready now - right now - or it's not going in. In which case there better be something else ready to fill the space it was supposed to occupy.
It seems counterintuitive – especially when seen alongside some games which apparently have a project length of n+1 (where n equals “when it’s ready”). The inspiration we drew from the magazine industry has been crucial to Denki's success and longevity - despite magazines being “old media” in almost every sense of the word.
Like many other developers we've also been inspired by the film industry. In our case it’s been the original Hollywood studio model, rather than the "everyone for themselves" model favoured today. The studio model describes the structure in which great groups can be forged. Teams that can be inspired, creative, punctual and in many ways wholly original. Pixar are undoubtedly the best example of this sort of studio model in action today. They demonstrate very effectively how this approach can be used.
We've also stolen several aspects of our approach from theatre. While many game developers like to draw comparisons between games and films, we don't really consider that to be the case at Denki. Games are much more like plays, or perhaps live television shows, than movies. There's never the luxury of shouting "cut" when something unexpected happens in your game.
Like a play, you have to expend a huge amount of effort up front, before anyone gets to see a thing. Rehearsal, preparation, rehearsal, costumes, rehearsal, set dressing, rehearsal, choreography – and then some more rehearsal. If you’re not prepared for all eventualities – from a forgotten line to an audience member having a heart attack – then your performance is going to be weak, easily thrown off course and unconvincing.
And that’s just the development cycle. It’s also true for players. If you’ve not anticipated, planned, made contingencies and thought through everything which can (and inevitably will) go wrong, then your game is going to end up with wobbly sets, forgotten dialogue and poor reviews. When that all starts happening, its scant comfort that your game is ‘nearly as good as’ similar titles.
These established industries, these areas of the media, these art forms have had many generations to perfect their performance, their planning and ultimately their art. Are we really prepared to accept that simply because we’re “new media” (a horrible and already outdated term, but you know what I mean), we have nothing to learn from them because they don't understand computers as well as us?
A New Enlightenment?
There’s a reason that magazines still come out on time every month, that major west end musicals can run twice daily for decades and why studios like Pixar can deliver ten hit films in a row. These things are not accidents, nor are they magic. I strongly suspect no ancient rituals were invoked by high-priests at any point in creating these modern day miracles.
We can all achieve this – even within the games industry. But first we need be willing to accept it's not magic, be willing to learn and look outside our own little corner of the world to find inspiration and best practice wherever it can be found. Just looking to other games companies isn’t enough – not even Denki! Unfortunately...
If we do, we can perhaps spark an Age of Enlightenment within the games industry and confine thoughts of the creative process as a “Black Art” to the pages of history once and for all.
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That's my favourite way to live for sure. Too bad I don't work with games (yet), but everything I do in my current Graphics Design area is to improve everything I can as much as I can, speed and quality. Now I'm (finally) moving onto independent development, and one of my favorites subjects are the workflow improvement (I don't have big budgets in mind).
Since maybe 2 years ago I started to have this mind foccus and now I'm making some money with consulting, modernizing other studios and companies, giving them better solutions on what they do, and I will bring it with me into game development.
The creative process isn't yet one of the aspects I'm advanced into flow. I find it easy pretty easy to get onto good things, but I know there are differences when you're working professionally, goods and bads. But I like to improve what I think is good, into better, so I have some places to search for ideas (or ways out the box). Some searchs in Deviantart.com, Corbis, and even the Sporepedia are good places to open your mind that you could do better. Mirroring images to make symetric images is good too. Taking look on common daily tasks, the way you use your softwares, and even your pipeline and workflow have potential too (your job could be a nice game, you know?).
But after all, a simple sentence could be: "The fast you get it done, the more time you have to make it good".
I have somewhat mixed thoughts about his statement:
- even if he was being sarcastic, he was 100% insane to say this in public. There were 800 odd comments on one site this morning, 100% skewed against him and his company as far as I read. This sounds like an exception to "no publicity is bad publicity";
- there are far too many examples of creative teams having fun while working towards hard deadlines and goals, in the gaming industry, other creative entertainment industries, and beyond;
- a kind interpretation would be that he was reacting to some internal teams who could not deal with and respond to goals and deadlines, teams that had "fun" in the sense of "no real responsibilities." I could read hints of this interpretation into your comments about being "utterly fed up hearing the myriad of excuses about why it was impossible to create quality to a deadline"
Regardless, interesting post.
@Michael: Definitely a great example of clumsy phrasing, but I'm not about to vilify him for it - I read his remarks in context and understand what he's getting at. And I can also see why that choice of wording could upset people - particularly those working at Activison! Creative industries walk an incredibly difficult line between entertainment and commerce and (as yet) there's no guaranteed right or wrong way of doing that. Each group has to discover what works for themselves - I certainly wouldn't want to presume what process might work best for any other company. It's taken me all this time to get close to figuring out what works for Denki! But I've worked in situations where the focus was entirely on having fun creating games, and also where it's been about shipping regardless of everything else, and can honestly say they both suck. The hints of this you picked up on in the passage about being "utterly fed up hearing the myriad of excuses" is definitely a reaction to the first of those situations. Denki's take on this is that fun is definitely part of the game creation process, but it's not the whole of it - any more than profit/loss accounts and budgets would be. For any company to be sustainable there has to be a balance struck between these traditional adversaries, and that balance needs to be founded on mutual respect, with each giving way to the other from time to time. I think that's important to appreciate in this business - there are periods when the fun of creating something must be a priority, but there are other times when it's equally important to put that to one side and focus on the harsh realities of what budgets permit. I'd like to think we have that balance approximately right most of the time at Denki, but it sounds like Activision might have needed to take a more drastic stance on this in the past to correct a historical position they'd got themselves in to. So, in summary? I see what he's getting at, although the process he describes certainly wouldn't work for Denki - fun is most definitely one of the ingredients our creative process requires; albeit not the only one!
The main issue I have is that magazines are purely content-driven while games have an element of technology/engineering. All you need to complete a magazine is to write (and do layout, etc), which is a known, well-understood process for an established format.
If your games are purely about executing an already established design, then I can see how you could make this work in a magazine-type way. However, for a non-trivial game design, it's not clear how to make things work.
For instance, let's say you're crazy and you decide to make a game based around the simulation of dynamic locomoting robots. Making characters move and balance in a physics-based world is an active research area in compsci/robotics, so even though we can cheat a bit in gamedev, we still have some hard problems to solve with no known existing solutions. This means that, while we can establish a plan of "try (a), try (b), fallback to (c) if all else fails" it's very hard to determine exactly how long this plan will take to find a working solution, or whether such a solution even exists!
This is the part I find hard to reconcile with magazines.. magazines aren't involved in R&D type work, they're just churning out content. But I would _love_ to be proven wrong since it would make scheduling a lot easier around here :)
I don't understand why we have this need to categorize and catalog something that is fundamentally a creative process in an infant industry. There is no science yet, no candle, and we're still in the dark.
Eventually though, maybe we'll have worked it out. But now, it's too soon. We need alchemy before we can do Chemistry, and astrology comes before Astrophysics. I say for now, we enjoy being Priests.
Then again, as an Indie, I don't worry about payrolls and things like that. So maybe I have the luxury of waiting for The Great Unknowable to bestow inspiration upon me.
@Glenn: No spying involved, but you know what they say: "Great minds think alike" :-) Thanks again - I'll definitely be adding "Impro" to my reading list. I'm still buzzing from your last recommendation, "Organizing Genius". Long live Great Groups indeed!
@Eric: Your points about alchemy and astrology being important steps along the way are very true. I'm just suggesting we don't content ourselves with this at the expense of progressing towards chemistry and astrophysics. You've reminded me of another reason people are often reluctant to search for more reliable processes - it can actually be great fun being a shaman or an oracle. No one in that position's likely to give it up and embrace scientific method without a fight! But having been fortunate enough to experience alchemical game development first hand I can honestly say that it gets really boring waiting on The Great Unknowable to bestow their inspiration after a while - especially when you're working in a team of 30 people, each of whom are all waiting for TGU at different times... That said, I'd also encourage anyone who finds themselves in that position to enjoy it while you can, because there's lots to be learned from it, and it can be great fun for sure!
I think it's a fair criticism to say that this sort of production process applies best when developing games in known genres, or with an established way of playing. That doesn't mean it has no relevance to pushing boundaries or creating experiences never seen before, just that it's asking a lot of any process to deliver innovation to a deadline. For me that limitation doesn't devalue the process at all. By comparison, building skyscrapers is a relatively well known and understood process today, but building anything that's never been built before - the tallest skyscraper, or an entirely new design - adds uncertainty and risk.
Applying a solid process like this diminishes uncertainty and risk, but it doesn't remove it completely. I think the two important points though are: 1) very few games create experiences never seen before, and even those that do will only have a small number of previously unseen features that can often be prototypes during the more predictable production process; and 2) you can apply this process to completely original products too, providing you schedule the opportunity to iterate - sometimes iterate a lot.
Good question though - and to your final point: yes, I believe we should all strive to move the industry forward. This article was aimed more at making sure that striving happens from a solid foundation rather than building on top of sand as I've seen all too often in this industry during my career.