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Lessons about game development are all around us.
One of my favorite shows for late-night DVR diversion is the new Food Network "Iron Chef sequel #7" program called "Chopped."
Four restaurant chefs (not yet ready for Iron Chef America) compete to impress a panel of three restauranteur judges. As designers we recognize the game's "skill-based musical chairs" structure:
-- There are three rounds: appetizer, entree and dessert.
-- The contestants get 20-30 minutes for each round, based on type of food.
-- The basket of surprise ingredients is opened at the start of each round. It always includes at least one bizarre item, and they have to use at least some of every food in the basket in their dish. Got a recipe for cantaloupe, watermelon and sardines, anyone?
-- After each round, one participant is "Chopped" by the judges for doing the least interesting and delicious dish. Whoever is left standing after the three eliminations is the winner, and picks up $10,000.
So what's the big lesson I've taken from watching the show? Most weeks the chefs get in trouble the same ways that ambitious game design teams get in trouble. Here's my take:
1. The most creative person usually fails first. It happens over and over again. In the first twenty-minute segment a really creative chef starts a complex, unique appetizer... one they can't possibly complete in 20 minutes. As the last 2 minutes roll by they desperately try to salvage what they can, and sometimes they don't even get everything onto the plate. The judges say how original and exciting their ideas were and how it's such a shame they didn't finish and how they have such great potential... and then they Chop the most creative person.
How many games have started with a brilliant set of ideas that wouldn't fit the schedule and budget? The last two months of crunch time can't salvage something really fun out of the dashed hopes and good intentions, and the team ends up getting Chopped.
2. There's Always Something You Don't Know How to Do. One show had tamarind paste as an ingredient. I thought, "That's why they have people who are head chefs on this show, because I have no idea how to use tamarind paste." Then I saw the eyes of one of the contestants. Sheer terror.
30 minutes later a judge was uttering the dreaded words, "This is inedible." You didn't have to wait through the commercial break to know he was the one being Chopped.
What "tamarind paste" have I seen sabotage game teams over the years? Pathfinding. Animations that skate. Online games choking on geometric growth in packet volume. Multithreading.
Teams assume that they've conquered the unknown before and they can do it again. A pathfinding system that is almost playable is as useless as a pathfinding system that doesn't work at all. Either the team has to bring in an expert who can rescue the project, or the game gets Chopped.
3. Once the most creative person is gone, the least creative person is usually next. After the first round the surviving chefs sometimes say to themselves, "Wow, I'm glad I wasn't creative like her! That's the secret to this game -- play it safe!"
Thirty minutes later they're serving something you can get at Outback and six commercials after that they're on their way home.
Game designers face the same gotcha. Get too ambitious for your budget and schedule, you fail. Outstretch the capabilities of your team and engine, you fail. Play it safe, you fail.
4. Fast deadlines, surprise requirements, and 2 zillion people watching your every move seldom produce great work. This show is about not committing suicide and not being boring. Of the nine dishes they eat, the judges seldom describe more than a couple as memorable.
This is where game development is different than the cooking show. We (usually) have fast deadlines, we (often) have surprise requirements, and some days it feels like 2 zillion people are looking over our shoulders. And we still have to produce something striking and memorable, because we don't have 3 opponents spread across a kitchen.
We have thousands of competitors spread across a planet.
So what can we do as team leaders when we face these problems? These questions go out to all the Producers and Publishers in the audience.
In the next week, what could you do on just one project to make a deadline (big or small) better suit the true requirements of the assignment?
Would it help if you took one hour in the next week and made up a list of ALL the requirements the milestone (or level, or module, or tool, etc.) has to meet in order to be considered complete and "110% totally done." Did that list already exist somewhere, or is it out of date or spread across a series of notebooks, emails and wiki pages?
On the next project you start, how could you structure the planning and preproduction phases to avoid the "short deadlines and guaranteed surprises mean the most creative teams fail first" catch-22?
Despite all these issues, great games get built every year. Thinking about these questions and then doing something about them -- even small improvements -- can help you protect your team from being Chopped.
Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow.
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