Minor addition to the writing question list.

Also how is it like to write without having any idea how the character will sound?

When writing, most designers envision how the character sounds as they're writing - when the time comes for auditions, they provide a series of sample lines, a picture of the character in-game, breakdowns of the age, brief history, etc., and then the casting agency will run through auditions looking for someone who can deliver the lines as envisioned. I was happy with the auditions Blindlight delivered for New Vegas, and I thought the companion actors they brought into the studio for the characters I wrote, while not big names, did a great job - a lot of it is in how Blindlight handles the auditions, and so much of a character is in the delivery, that if you can get the casting right, it just makes the process go more smoothly.

If you're fortunate and the schedule works in your favor, you can also request a specific voice actor. This depends on timing and cost, and as a general rule, the more famous an actor is, the less flexible the time in the studio and less availability for pick-ups (the equivalent of Voice-Over bugfixing if a level quest changes, a character's line is missing, or we need to add a line to fix a missing sequence).

Other times, you're told who the voice actor is first, which is rare for me. When that happens, you watch everything you can featuring that actor and try to write to the actor's strengths. As an example, for Fallout: New Vegas, John Gonzalez studied John Doman's acting when writing and Eric Fenstermaker did research on Felicia Day to get the tone of the characters that played to the strength of the actors.

2 More:

How do you choose who writes each (major) character in a game, also who's allowed to do any writing?

Depends, sometimes it's just necessity (you have the most bandwidth, so you do X person, or you're already doing the main city where the character resides, so it's best if you write Y antagonist), other times we're able to purposely assign folks with skill sets to characters (which Josh did on Fallout New Vegas). For Fallout New Vegas, Josh broke down the companion personalities and assigned them to designer he felt showed strengths in those character backgrounds - for example, understanding of certain psychological conditions, or (in my case) because I'd written the father of one of the companions, or because the person has a fluid storytelling style (Travis Stout, which is only one of his strengths), which makes him great for characters with campfire stories to share.

What if a programmer/artists/whatever suddenly really wanted to do some writing, would he/she have a chance, even if minor?

If there was room in the schedule, sure. We'd probably ask they do a minor character first to get a feel for their writing, since it's more than just writing - it's the scripting and editor knowledge as well. In my experience, however, it is very difficult to break out of a role, and even designers that are jack of all trades usually take on one specific role per project because that's all there's time for. That's true across all departments. I have found developers that knock their own writing are actually much better than they realize, however, and all they need is to be told that to make them more confident about stepping up.

From a multi-part question on Twitter.

How do Project Directors and/or Lead Designers get selected?

To clarify the hierarchy at our studio, a Project Director isn't necessarily a designer, and at Obsidian, a Project Director is above all other disciplines except Feargus, who is all-powerful, even if he might debate that.

At the moment, we have four project directors - one from design (Josh Sawyer), another from design (me), one from programming (Rich Taylor), and one from art (Zane Lyon). In the past, Project Directors have been from production (Feargus on DS3, Chris Parker on AP), and sometimes the Project Director on a project is instead the Lead Producer (Kevin Saunders on Mask of the Betrayer).

Project Directors are selected based on their ability to hold or create the vision for a project, motivate and inspire the team, and their ability to focus the game to the vision and the game pillars. Any individual on a team who has demonstrated these qualities at a senior level as they've risen through the ranks in their discipline (usually to lead status) is considered a candidate for Project Director. Rich Taylor, for example, consistently demonstrated strengths as a lead programmer, and also demonstrated good judgment and decisions on how to go about making the game he was leading (Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir, and now Dungeon Siege).

Lead Designers are selected for much the same reason - they're usually senior designers who've shown the same strengths in upholding the game vision, ability to motivate and lead a team, and can manage effectively. Like other lead roles, Lead Designers are not necessarily chosen for their design ability, and they may not be the best designer in their discipline, they simply need to understand the design pipelines, understand the toolset and its breakdowns, and how to manage a team - this is because leads spend more time managing the designers in their discipline than doing actual core design work. If they excel in design, as Josh does, then that's a bonus.

More answers on this topic to follow.

Anyone who's curious about Fallout: New Vegas and Dungeon Siege III, we have three events lined up at Comic-Con if you want to check them out.

Thursday 7.22.10

1:00-2:00 Video Game Comics: The Next Big Thing— Are video games the biggest thing to hit comics since superheroes? Richard George from IGN explores this phenomenon, along with representatives from Dark Horse, EA, IDW, and WildStorm. Featuring some of the hottest video game properties in comics: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Gears of War, Fallout: New Vegas, Army of Two, God of War and more, this is one panel fans of either medium won't want to miss! Room 5AB

Should be a fun time, we'll be discussing what it's like to work with Fallout in comic-book form.

Friday 7.23.10

4:30-5:30 Fallout: Game Writing in Evolving Franchises— Obsidian Entertainment, the developers working on Bethesda's upcoming Fallout New Vegas, walk through the process of narrative and cinematic techniques used in bringing life and reactivity to franchises over the years, focusing on their upcoming work on Bethesda's Fallout New Vegas. Examples will also be drawn from upcoming titles, Dungeon Siege III, and previous titles such as Neverwinter Nights 2, Alpha Protocol, and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The developers will discuss how the franchise and development team can help guide the narrative and cinematic presentation of these elements and will showcase footage from these titles. Room 9

Folks attending will be John Gonzalez (story and creative lead for Fallout: New Vegas), and George Ziets (creative lead on Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, and the creative lead for Dungeon Siege III) and me discussing the narrative conventions we use in the title and hopefully show some gameplay elements from both titles.

Some questions from forum goers/emailers: TheJokester

Do you have any recommendations on what schools would be good to go to for game development?

The Guildhall's pretty solid (a few of our designers on Fallout New Vegas were hired from there). They usually have strong portfolios based on classwork they've done, which they can usually use for quick submission in designer tests, too.

If you end up going to any gaming school, just make sure they put you in group projects, as no game developer works alone, so the team experience is important.

I've mentioned this before, you don't need school - more often than not, it's what you do outside of school and the results you get on your own that really end up giving you the experience you need for the gaming industry. For example, working on mods, making your own Neverwinter modules, doing Oblivion/Fallout mods, writing for magazines, compilations, web sites, mod communities, characters for mods, comics, game strategy guides, etc. The important thing is that you do something and have results of your efforts to show others.

Finally, having something folks can play rather than just documentation of what they can play is preferred. If your submission shows you've built it and played it and others can play it, that makes your submission stand out.

And same question, for art schools.

I polled some of the designers here at work, and the following schools they endorsed were:

Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida (one of the artists on AP and our unannounced titles went there, and I believe the founder of Massive Black, whose company did F3/FNV concept art went there). One of the school's strength is in 3D animation and illustration.

If you're in the SF area, our interface artist on FNV recommended the Academy of Art in SF, and he strongly recommends the computer art program there, and he has friends that teach in Art Institute of California in SF and recommends the program there as well.

One of our environment artists on FNV recommended the Rio Hondo Community College and she went to Cal State Fullerton, and she thinks it has a pretty strong Animation/Art program.

One of our animators on FNV, however, says **** it and just make sure you develop a good portfolio, regardless of the school.

Some other general stuff:

I have an idea for an FNV game system or perk, and it's X.

If you have an idea, my suggestion is to post it on the forum for discussion and send us a link - while our opinion is great, having the opinion of 20+ folks to it may help refine the suggestion and get more feedback on it.

This applies to song suggestions as well, but those are okay to send at any time.

How do you set up technical constraints for dialogues for your titles?

We're actually giving a talk at GDC Austin (it's on the Narrative/Writing track - the actual name of the conference is GDC Online now, I believe) on the dialogue standards we set up individually for our titles - the standards depend on the genre (D+D is different than Star Wars which is different than Alpha Protocol which is different than New Vegas which is... well, you get the idea). The standards encompass the amount of text on screen, formatting for skill placement, how to set up item description text, quest logs, quest log entries, clarifying objective text, amount of voice-acted dialogue players should see on screen, how the game mechanics of the dialogue and the dialogue systems work and how they should be paced (alignment shifts, reputation shifts, Light Side/Dark Side gains and how to communicate that to the player), and more. With any luck, John Gonzalez (our story lead and creative lead for New Vegas) and George Ziets (Mask of the Betrayer story crafter and designer) will be joining me up there. Hopefully, we can talk about our unannounced title then and the work George has been doing on it, even if he's modest about it as always.

For any aspiring narrative designers, Austin GDC's a great place to meet narrative designers in the industry, too, highly recommended.

Obsidian should be at Comic-Con, too, although more on that in a bit.

Your Messenger Inbox has been full for years and I want to send you a message.

Send any emails to CAvellone@obsidian.net - that account never fills up, much to our IT department's chagrin. I've tried clearing out the Forum Messenger Inbox in the past, but history has shown I can't keep up with the flow, especially across multiple email accounts and still stay sane. So when possible if you have something you want to ask or is really urgent, drop me a line at that email address and I'll do what I can to help you.

The only thing I'd ask is understand that we're working hard on Fallout New Vegas, so it might be a while before I can respond to you if your email has a lot of questions. Regardless, I will try.

Chris

Questions from Davide Scalzo:

[b]1) What do you think about the concept of emergent narrative?

1. I think the concept of emergent narrative is stronger than any enforced narrative. I think a blend can work well (and it's what I prefer whenever possible), but I think the stories players create on their own from interesting system mechanics and AI behavior has more weight and meaning than anything a designer tries to do. My favorite example is that no enforced narrative can really trump the story of planting dynamite on victims in Fallout, superstimming people to death, or how a character's 3rd level dwarven fighter with 5 hit points trained 20 orcs into a narrow, funneled corridor and killed them all one by one with a ball-peen hammer, Oldboy-style. The player makes stories like that happen, and those are the stories I hear players talk about most in relation to games, computer game or pen-and-paper games, not necessarily their reaction to specific cued story events or anything the designer or GM tried to force on them.

Note that realization came pretty quickly on in my GMing days, and it's another lesson I learned from pen-and-paper games which still holds true in computer games. The amount of glee the Fallout PNP players had when they did a critical hit against one of the major NPC adversaries early on in the campaign was another reminder - and a reminder to myself to let the gaming session chips fall where they may. Generally, I don't like to make major characters in games sacred and invulnerable unless I absolutely have to.

2) Do you think is something already out there or it is still and embryo?

2. It's already out there, and was present in Oblivion and other open-world style games and even in many MMOs, where player raiding stories are generally more involved than the actual pacing of the raid itself. It's been around for almost as long as gaming has been around, in my opinion.

3) How do you think will influence the game-play in the next (let's say) 10 years?

3. I think it will always be a certain open-world game "type" for the next few years, and it may evolve into something greater afterward.

4) How do you think will influence the emotional side of the games?

4. I think when done properly, it can add to the sense of wonder and exploration, and if done poorly or if mechanics in the game are difficult to pull off or don't give proper feedback (stealth, planting explosives, poison and drug effects on self and others) then it only adds to the frustration.

Translation from PCAction.de, although I'd argue Google does a more amusing job than my original text.

Please introduce yourself (full name, age, company, position):

I'm Christopher Frederic Avellone (you want the full name, you got it, even the embarassing middle name that my Mom picked from some French emperor which I've never understood). My job? Creative Director at Obsidian Entertainment, which means I review and do a lot of design. I'm almost at the 4 decade mark (minus 2 years), I still feel young at heart.

Please share some interesting moments of your career (e.g. games your worked on or companies you worked for etc.):

I helped train police officers and FBI agents in Quantico, VA in a fake town called "Hogan's Alley" where they built an entire three block radius as a training ground for criminal scenarios - each day we'd go in, be given a cast sheet and a schedule (you're a kidnapper today, and you need to be in the pool hall by 3pm). I've written for pen-and-paper role playing games, and I've worked on a lot of computer role-playing games, especially Dungeons and Dragons (Torment, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 2), Fallout (Fallout 2, Van Buren, Fallout New Vegas), and I was also Lead Designer on Torment, Van Buren (stage 1, Josh Sawyer took over for Stage 2 after I left to help found Obsidian), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, and most recently, Alpha Protocol. My high school guidance counselor neglected to mention game development as a career option, and I am somewhat irritated by this because as a career, it's GREAT.

Some funny/curious/entertaining facts about your life (e.g. you would kill for an ice cream/you’ve got 16 kids at once/you actually hate video games etc.):

I have a kona blend coffee addiction, only with hazelnut creamer, though. I make notes in all the books I read and put post-it notes in every comic book I read so I can remember certain passages and images that would make cool spells, creatures, character names, or locations. This also prevents me from borrowing books from my friends, as I have a tendency to mark them up with pens and write game ideas in them. I feel like I've worked on every science fiction genre I never imagined I would ever touch. Like Star Wars. And Aliens. And Star Trek. If I could go back in time to "past Chris" and explain to him that not only would he eventually date girls and not stress about dying alone, I would also explain to him that he needs to appreciate all the hours he spent absorbing Star Wars, Aliens, and Star Trek and that it would eventually develop into a lucrative, fulfilling career that would make his soul happy. End advice for everyone: do what you love to do, there's a career doing it or something close to it somewhere out there. : )

Well, let’s get to the interview:

What does your workday at Obsidian Entertainment look like?

My day at Obsidian begins the night before - I go into Rasputin mode and predict the future by checking my schedule for the next day, checking my daily email folder for the day to see what I dumped in there ("...it's Thursday tomorrow, I need to have that interview done for Friday."), then watch TV or movie related to a current project (for example, throughout Alpha Protocol, I was watching 24 almost non-stop, and for Fallout New Vegas, I've been traveling back through my library of post-holocaust movies). I then go to sleep, dream I'm Mad Max, wake up, exercise, go into work at 9:30, tear through inbox, check the daily folders and task lists to see what the schedule is for the day, then focus on three major tasks and try to knock them out before the end of the day (can be character design, writing scripts, doing a designer applicant interview, design document review, playing an area of the New Vegas build and typing up feedback, or even doing this interview). By 7PM, I'm usually staring blearily at the screen, so I either go workout again or play Fallout 3 until I feel like doing more work and going home, then rinse and repeat. I usually find it difficult to write characters during the day, so I usually wait until afterhours to do pitches, proposals, and get into the "voice" of the character for an area.

Obsidian is famous for its RPGs. So what about you? Do you only play RPGs?

When not playing Fallout New Vegas builds, I'm (re)playing Fallout 3 to hit every single major, minor, random, and DLC location in the overland map, at about 60 hours right now and I've only covered a third of the territory, I'm about to hit the Pitt after getting yanked up into Mothership Zeta. (Ed: Got to the Pitt a while ago, then the milestone hit.)

What are your favorite games of all times? And what about movies/music?

Fallout 1, Chronotrigger, Zuma, Final Fantasy III, the Hero System, Illuminati, Chez Geek, System Shock 2, Bomberman (multiplayer), Robotron 2084, Myth 1, Ultima Underworld I. I have a lot of "design doc" games that I think all designers should play (Dead Space's interface is really incredible, for example).

If you had a chance to change something in the gaming industry, what would it be (and why)?

The role of audio, narrative, and QA status. Audio and narrative are made part of the process much too late in many cases and the current process makes iterating on a story much less fluid. As for QA, I don't think QA has ever been treated with the level of recompensation it deserves nor have the skills that quality assurance brings to a title recognized for their true value.

Please continue this sentence: „If I hadn’t got a job in the gaming industry, I probably would be a …“. Why?

...a struggling comic book author and cartoonist. I say this because it's what I do in my spare time right now, I write Star Wars titles when I can and I do cartooning on the side as well. It's a huge relief to do something quick and creative, since games can take such a long time to develop. If I couldn't get a full time job as an author or cartoonist, I'd probably be a teacher or lawyer.

Some games are very popular. But unlike in the movie business there is only a small fan audience adoring the people behind the product (e.g. game’s producers, directors, sound makers etc.). Are you annoyed by that fact?

Nope. There's so many people involved with making a product good (or bad) anyway, it'd be hard to juggle them all. I am only annoyed when people don't give credit where credit is due, and if magazine articles come out that give credit where credit isn't due (usually by accident or giving people wrong titles), that makes me sad.

What’s your personal opinion of themes like sex and violence in video and computer games?

I love sex. I love the fact my parents loved having sex. Sex is great. Our species would die out without sex. I consider taboos on sex ridiculous in any M-rated title where the label says "hey, there's sex in here." In short, sex is great for the species, and it made me who I am today... as in, alive. I don't have an opinion on violence because I am too busy thinking about sex.

Casual games destroy the market for core games“. Do you agree? Why? Why not?

I don't believe casual games are intentionally trying to hurt core games' feelings or cause them any physical harm. I believe both should exist in harmony, holding hands, and providing fun for all. I will say casual games delight me because they allow for more random experimental fun than some big budget titles to, or are afraid to experiment with.

Is there anything about your job that you dislike?

Performance reviews, always knowing that any design you do could have been 20% better and you have to leave that extra 20% for the next title, the escalating cost of games making it less likely publishers and developers will take risks, and the parameters that production and voice acting places on narrative design.

What would you suggest our readers who want to start a career as a game developer?

Do the job before you get the job. If you want to design computer games, go ahead and do it - there's plenty of mods and game editors out there, and they'll teach you more practical experience on how to make games than reading or listening to someone talk about making games. Also, anything you do with a game editor or a modding community ends up being something you can place on your resume or in a game developer application as something you worked on, and those submissions carry a lot of weight with us.

Polygamer went live with an interview I did for them a while ago (Polygamer Interview), and here's the English translation for those who don't know much beyond their high school French... like me.

1] At Polygamer we ask ourselves many things about videogames, for example why it’s able to distress us, stress us, to inject adrenaline to us, to make us think (with enigmas especially), but why does it rarely make us really laugh and almost never cry ?

Humor in games is hard. What makes us laugh or cry varies per individual - and it's difficult to build up enough sympathy for a character to create the emotion of sadness in the first place.

The times I've seen humor used successfully has been in games like Monkey Island, where for me, the dialogue and the style of presenting the dialogue is what I found especially humorous. I also appreciate moments where sarcasm are used in games, since I appreciate good sarcasm and find it amusing, but that's not true for everyone.

So onto crying. Crying can stem from loss. So the question is, how do you build up a connection to an NPC such that you feel sympathy for them and miss them when they're gone? The only game that has done this for me is Infocom's Planetfall. The only game I attempted to make the player feel a sense of loss was Planescape Torment, and it worked there because the person you were losing was your player character - you weren't watching someone else go away, you were the one going away from your companions.

So my advice? Make the loss personal, and make it centered on the character.

2] As an author full of ideas, what would you do to make us laugh like fools or cry like little girls? Would you work especially on the narration ? Interaction ? Visuals ?

Don't force the humor, let it come out of context of the player's actions, and whenever possible, make that humor reactive based on the player's actions, not on watching a passive sequence. Try to get inside the player's head, and not only anticipate what they may think, but provide options for it. As an example, nothing created a more sympathetic reaction for me than Ripley in Aliens echoing exactly what the viewer is thinking ("Nuke 'em from orbit." Followed by "They can bill me.") - everyone in the audience can completely sympathize with getting the hell off of LV-426 and dropping nukes on a nest of vicious predators with acid for blood. So look for points in the game where you catch yourself thinking of a solution and have characters in the game echo what the player might be thinking.

Narration, interaction, and visuals can all contribute to humor or sense of loss, but really, you want to focus on the audio.

The tone of a voice actor and the background music will do more to create mood than any visual or interaction sequence can strive for. As an example, in Alpha Protocol, Michael Thorton can develop a romance or a hatred with a contact, Madison, in the game... and when you interact with Madison, the music and the voice acting is what drives the emotion of the scene. When you have a hatred going, the music is tense, dangerous, and everything about Madison's tone tells you how much she despises you. On the counterbalance, the voices and music (softer, slower) is what drives home the romance at the other end of the spectrum.

3] Let us imagine that I am in a good position at Microsoft and Epic, I give you the head of the next Gears of War development with totally freedom. What would you with that and why ?

I'd probably turn it into a fantasy 3rd person RPG, and give the main character a colorful outfit, pointy ears, a hat, and... I don't know... a boomerang, sword, shield, and some bombs.

4] Let us imagine that I am in a good position at Nintendo (yes, many people love me), I give you the head of the next Zelda development with totally freedom. What would you do with that and why ?

I'd have Link's world invaded by creatures that live below the earth, give Link battle armor, a chainsaw assault rifle, the ability to call down blasts from a Hammer of Dawn death cannon in orbit, and the ability to maximize his use of cover in order to wipe out encroaching hordes of mole-like humanoids from holes that erupt from the ground.

5] Will sex in video games be possible one day ? (I mean games with sexual relationships inside for adult only of course, not strange relationships with your consoles or something like that My question wants to make you tell us about censorship and adult stories in video games.)

Yes. There's already plenty of mini-games related to it in mainstream titles, so that trend will only be iterated on until you get the whole experience. I'm not talking about solely pornography here, I believe there are romances and situations where sexual activity can be interactive and still be artistic (Mass Effect is going well along these lines, personally).

6] Do you have frustrations as a videogames creator ? Which ? Why ?

Only the typical ones regarding resources, time tables, and parameters. I'm sure we'd all like to blue sky elements and put all of our ideas into games, it's just a question of how and how and much it'll cost in the industry.

7] Was making video games better before than now ?

It's better in some ways and worse in others - a more detailed answer relates to voice acting.

In some respects, having a fully voice acted game is great. On the development side, however, the cost, resources, and the inflexibility of iterating on recorded VO (as well as arranging the studio sessions) makes it a challenge for developing an RPG. So... for every aspect of game development, there's tradeoffs. The industry definitely has changed over time, resulting in more and more specialization in art, design, and programming, and resulting in larger team sizes, which makes delivering a vision more difficult, but not impossible.

The solution to this, however, is just to go make your own games for fun, and in many respects, I thank the iPod and mobile phone community for the opportunity to release tinier, more manageable games that are fun to play.

8] Tell us about one or several of your projects which you would have loved to release but you could not for various reasons. There appears that each creator has at least a cursed project of this type in his bundle, so do it, please frustrate us with this game we will never be able to play… Moreover, with the time, what do you think about this project(s) which stay on the paperboard and why do they stay like it ?

I wanted to do a Planescape Torment sequel called Lost Souls where it took the lives of Deionarra, Ravel, Dak'kon and others from the original and told their tangential stories in an RPG format before and during the events of Torment.

I also wanted to do one other game set in the Planescape universe that wasn't tied to Torment itself, called Planescape: Tesseract. I actually turned a sample of the premise into a 2-3 hour pen-and-paper game session that played at GDC one year with a lot of press folks (and Ray and Greg from BioWare), giving each of the folks a pre-made player character and a time limit to accomplish their goals. I really liked the character designs, and I'd love to develop those characters, but most of them only work in the context of a Planscape-style universe.

9] With respect to your experience, what would you to advise to a guy who starts from scratch with empty pockets and who launches out in the industry with a lot of ideas and ambition ?

Get a part-time job that doesn't drain you of creativity, or even better, lands you a job in the game industry without actually being in game development. If you have ideas, realize them yourself - make mods and use the many game editors out there (NWN1, NWN2, G.E.C.K.) to make your own game content and see if you actually like doing it.

If you do and have a passion for it, you're going to learn a lot on your own, and at the least, it's a hell of a thing to put on your resume. We've hired folks solely based on their mod success with existing RPG editors (ex: Jorge Salgado, who created Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul mod).

10] Are the games which marked you as a player the same ones which impressed you as a creator ?

Yep, and System Shock 2 is top of that list, followed by Chronotrigger. Portal's on there, too - if someone had told me they wanted to do a FPS where you didn't have a gun, I would have shaken my head. Portal proved me wrong.

11] And last, to ask you a more classic question: Tell us about your next projects and/or ideas that you would like to explore…

I'd love to do a game based on the HBO series the Wire - the whole idea of slowly building up a case against a target and balancing the character flaws of your squad of malcontents to make a successful criminal case is intriguing. When watching the Wire, I was so used to the one-hour turn around in most legal dramas, and to observe a single case stretch over the course of a year actually made the characters and your investment in the case as a viewer much more. You could do the same thing with a computer game.

Game design...

One game design question from Nicole Swimley:

How do you go about getting ideas into a cohesive format? And what methods do you use to start narrowing down what makes for a better design?

- Write one sentence about your game, tell it to someone you trust, then study their expressions to see if they get the hook. Repeat this to various people until you have a good sampling. Ideally, any game you do should be cool enough to explain why it's cool and fun in one sentence. If not, you may need to rethink the game... or the sentence.

- Even better, draw a sketch about your game and gameplay and show it to someone - if that immediately communicates why the game is fun, that's good. The reason I say sketch of the game is because I would play Psychonauts or Deathspank solely by looking at a character concept shot. Shallow, I know.

- After the steps above, choose 3 things about your game that you want to be the coolest things about it, and choose the priority of those cool things (1st, 2nd, and 3rd or A, B, and C priority). Do not choose more than 3. Arguably, I wouldn't recommend choosing more than one cool thing for your first outing - keep it manageable (see below).

- Once you have the coolest of the three ideas, do what you can to prototype that element first. Keep design documentation to a minimum until you get something working on screen, and the sooner, the better. (Doing design documentation, formulas, stat charts, etc. and even the story usually ends up being worthless once a sampling of the mechanisms and content are actually in the game - it's more important to get the basics in and be able to easily iterate on it). Also, don't have the tweakable numbers or the gameplay solely in the hands of programming, make sure they can expose the mechanics and values to you so you can play around with them. This is not to cut programming out of the loop, it's done so you don't have to bother them every single time you want to adjust the sword swing speed by a a few milliseconds.

- If you can't program or don't know enough about a toolset engine to do it yourself, grab a programmer who's excited about your idea. Then bring them cookies to help you out, if need be.

Game pitches...

Also, got a lot of questions concerning game pitches recently, and here's my first pass of thoughts on doing a game proposal pitch:

- Again, if you can't make your game idea sound cool to your friends in a single sentence, consider re-evaluating your idea.

- Make sure you specify all the target platforms in your pitch document.

- Any publisher is going to want to know how long the project is going to take, who's on this project, who your team is - so if you don't have a team, budget, or time table, it's time to assemble all of these.

- Whenever possible, having a prototype your target publisher or developer can play - or you can demo - is worth far more than just a written pitch.

- Having an idea for a game is worth far less than the strength to implement it. No game company is at a loss for game ideas, they're usually more interested in people who can make it happen.

- If this is your first game, don't put in every single cool feature you can think of (for example, I'd shy away from an adventure game with RTS elements and a full heroic RPG dungeon crawl mode). My suggestion is break down each of the systems of your game and do a smaller game based solely around that, polish the hell out of that game mechanic, then do a second game that proves the next mechanic out (possibly adding what you learned about the first system to that), and so on. A lot of successful games on the market have a number of systems that have been iterated on heavily until they're polished.

- Concept art is worth more than a text description. When in doubt, show visuals or screenshots of gameplay rather than describing it with words.

- Reviewers at publishers get a lot of pitches, so keep your pitch brief, no more than 3-5 pages (5 pages is pushing it).

- Learn to use Excel, you'll need it for budgets and spreadsheets showing your man month cost. And you'll need to provide that at some point, even if it's just for yourself.

- Not sure who to contact? Sign up on LinkedIn.com, look for Business Development guys, drop them a line (don't send the idea), and ask for advice. If they don't get back to you, you wouldn't want to work for that company anyway.

- Start with companies you like.

- If that doesn't work, look for companies that are in the same game space (social games, for example) but don't look for ones that do games close to the one you're thinking of - look for ones that have a hole in their game portfolio that your product would be perfect for.

- Don't send unsolicited pitches to Obsidian. It's not because we hate you, it's because we can't review them legally.

- Make sure your pitches are submitted electronically - don't do a physical pitch, the pitch usually needs to be emailed around to a bunch of folks.

- Watch out for fonts in your docs and make sure the fonts you're using are common ones that the recipient is likely to have on their system (or else submit the pitch as a pdf). Nothing looks worse than a pitch that's missing the unique font that you used to assemble it.

- Lastly, make sure you're legally protected before you send in a pitch - if you're not sure how to do this, contact your IGDA chapter or look up the lawyers or other legal speakers for the current year's GDC and drop them a line. There's usually a panel every year at GDC focusing on law in the game industry, and the speakers are putting themselves out there so you can ask them questions, and potentially hire them down the road.

Good luck!

Chris

A question from Chris Norris:

Greetings, Mr. Avellone

I saw your lecture at Framework 09 and was deeply inspired. I am currently studying to be an animator, but writing and design speak to me more than art or animation does. I was hoping I could ask you a few short questions?

1) I've looked at transferring to a games design degree and they teach classes such as physics, programming (LUA, C++) -and- manage to pack one or two art classes in there as well. I am wondering if these classes are actually necessary. As a designer, do you find yourself needing to know physics and programming? They seem somewhat irrelevant and the course structure as well seems schizophrenic with all the different subjects they pack in.

2) I admit I smiled when I heard you ran possible scenarios for BIS games with your development staff. I have to agree that that is an excellent way to gauge a written scenario and receive quick feedback. However, do you think it a faux pas if one mentions one does gamemastering during a job interview for a design position? What do you think are helpful things one should say during such an interview?

Thank you very much for your time!

Chris Nonis

PS - Very much looking forward to Alpha Protocol.

1. No, it's not mandatory, but it does help to understand scripting, physics, and programming. Same with art.

Any designer who can script their own AI tactics simulator to test squad behavior, automate testing routines for balancing alien enemy one-on-one fights, or can hop into 3D Max and block out their concept for how they want the boss fight scaffolding to be set up, is going to have an advantage over any designer who can't.

Ideally, you want to be constantly working to broaden your knowledge base across all departments, both for ease of communication and to see ways of accomplishing your designs that you may not have realized. Being able to speak in the language of another department's toolset or editor can get your ideas across quicker as well.

2. No, it's not a faux pas to bring up gamemastering, as long as you have concrete materials you developed for the sessions that are applicable to the position, and they can be presented in design document format. For example, when running dual campaigns at Black Isle, I wrote a lot of explicit direction for cut scenes, mapped out Denver, mapped out scavenger camps, detailed out all the stats and voice direction for 30+ salvagers, did all the quest lines, dungeons, boss critter stats, weapon charts, and loot tables for the city, and trust me, that stuff is pretty damn relevant in most RPGs out there. A lot it made it into design documentation as well, some of which is already out on the net. Ferret Baudoin also did gamemastering for scenarios that took place in Neverwinter Nights 2 while we were at Obsidian for the NWN2 original campaign, and that was a lot of fun.

I will say it's much more relevant to actually have done design in a computer game mod or module for NWN1 or NWN2, however (whenever possible, you want to make a submission that someone can load up and play), so if you have time and the choice, do it from the computer game development angle, not the pen and paper game angle.

Note that if I got someone in an interview and they said they did gamemastering, it's not the kiss of death, far from it. I would have a number of questions, however - first off would be the system they use, what house rules they made and why, how do they incorporate PC backgrounds and traits into the campaign, how long they've been running the campaign (and if it fragmented, how often and why), and finally, what the player turnover rate is in the campaign (there are GMs who run a lot of campaigns, but the best sign of being a good entertainer is how long people stuck with the campaign because they were enjoying themselves).

Hope that helps.

Chris