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The Community Blog (An Invitation)
New Community Blog (The Unintentional Gatekeeping of Video Games)

Blogs

Chris Avellone's Blog

Dead Money, Design Breakdowns.

With Dead Money coming out for the PC and PS3 this week, I got into a discussion about how I feel about its reception and some of the design decisions. In short, my feelings concern the context of the specific design elements. Some folks understand the "why" of the challenge elements even if they don't agree with them, which is fine, as long as they get why we did it the way we did - and that may not be apparent. So: If you play the adventure and want to dig deeper into the reasons behind the co
Chris Avellone's Blog

Writing --> Studio

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 envisi
Chris Avellone's Blog

Writing, Cont.

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 companio
Chapmania

Realism vs. What Designers Care About, Verisimilitude, and the Responsibility of Expectations

Something that seems to frequently come up when discussing the design of a game system is whether or not some aspect of that system adheres to reality. Or, more precisely, whether the outcomes of that system accurately simulate the results that the person making the argument expects, based on their particular interpretation of reality.   Generally, these arguments come from players, or from non-designers, or less experienced designers, and will take the form of, "But XXXX isn't realistic!" o
Chris Avellone's Blog

On Project Directors and Lead Designers

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),
Chris Avellone's Blog

School Stuff, FNV, Austin, Contact.

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
Chris Avellone's Blog

Emergent Narrative

Questions from Davide Scalzo:   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 r
Chris Avellone's Blog

PCAction.de Interview Translation

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 (
Chapmania

Difficulty Settings

In advance, I want to mention that I am using GTA as a theoretical example in this case. I actually don't remember what it did for difficulty levels - it was just a clear example to explain the terms I'm using.   Something that I've done a lot of thinking about is difficulty modes. Not just because it's something you have to consider on every project, but also because it ties directly into the core meat of system design - what causes your game to be challenging? What level of challenge is fun
Chris Avellone's Blog

Game Pitches + Design Thoughts

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 a
Chris Avellone's Blog

Classes to Take and Games to Run

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 w
Chris Avellone's Blog

Interview Advice.

Some minor tips for interviewing... or deciding where to interview.   First off, know what you want to do. If you're not sure if you want to be a programmer or a designer, choose one and focus on that until you (1) realize you hate it, or (2) discover you love it. More than that, if you decide to be a certain discipline - art, programming, design, or production, research the field enough to know what sub-set of that discipline you want to pursue. For example, for design, knowing whethe
Joshin' Around!

high-level writing principles

At work, we have a lot of rules for how to write. These range from punctuation (single-spacing after terminal punctuation) to spelling ("all right" vs. "alright") to structural (where a "goodbye" response should be relative to a "start combat" response and where that should be relative to a "friendly" response). Every project has a document (or documents) on the specific guidelines for that project. In spite of all the details, there are certain high-level principles that tend to be common. Okay
Chris Avellone's Blog

Fallout Fan Question

Alex Nistor:   Concerning Fallout 3 , I really was curious to hear your more in-depth opinion about it.   So you said you had a similiar opinion on it to Sawyer, but what was missing from that, in my opinion, was a breakdown of your pro's and Con's for Fallout 3.   Considering Bethesda made it in a similiar style to Oblivion, I just wanted to know specifically, how was the transition?   And like I said in the above comment, what did you like and not like.
Chris Avellone's Blog

How much character backstory is enough?

Next question about game writing is from Jonas...   WARNING: This blog is a spoiler, so if you haven't played Knights of the Old Republic II you may want to stop reading here.   Hey Chris,   I'll try to keep this short out of respect for your time. I just found myself with a deep desire to know how much background material you tend to write for an average companion NPC in the party-based games you've worked on. I'm trying to get a feel for how much background mater
Chris Avellone's Blog

Video Game Writing vs. Writing

I get a lot of questions from folks regarding narrative design and getting into the industry (especially after the Trzynasty Schron interview).   When possible, I'll be posting the answers here as well in case anyone else has the same questions (or wants to comment or add to any of these answers).   To start it off, here's the 1st of 3 questions from Joey 😄   Do you feel that video game writing, and video game story creation differ from other forms of creative writin

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