Freelance
News Service
Gaming: It's a Life
By William Cracraft
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America spends a ton of money on entertainment and a huge chunk of that goes into video games. Along with providing entertainment, gaming companies are technology companies. "I think we're one edge of that world, that's true," said Rich Hilleman, executive producer for Electronic Arts, Inc. a top game maker in San Mateo.
"There are all different kinds of software developers, it's a very collaborative art form. We may be at a place where some of them converge," Hilleman added. The two parts of game software production are design and development. Designers think up ideas and how to present the game.
Developers are the people who make computer programs work. Game companies try to get the best of each, then use advancing technology to stay ahead of the competition. Electronic Arts spends 35-45 percent of operating costs on game development.
"My guess is we spent another 40-45 percent on the art. About 5 percent goes into music and ten percent on design and production," said Hilleman. Developing a game takes a lot of coordination by different groups within a company, sub-contractors and specialists. EA is currently developing its Tiger Woods Golf game. In that product there are three big pieces.
"One of them is a display system which takes the course and player data and shows it on the screen relative to where they're supposed to be in the game, said Hilleman. "The screen shows Tiger Woods and other players at an interesting camera angle with shadows and bushes all in the right place and the ball bounces when its supposed to and falls in the water when its supposed to.
"Second is a big piece of programming associated with communication via the Internet between different machines which are golfing at the same time so that you and your dad in New York City can play golf together on Saturday afternoon at Pebble Beach," said Hilleman.
The third piece is the whole collection of code that tries to simulate how a golfer thinks about playing golf and how they do what's called course management. and finally "when Tiger Woods is up he's got to make the choices you're making when your playing the game and he has to do that in a pretty good fashion or Tiger won't let us ship the product," said Hilleman.
MicroPro, a gaming company in Alameda, develops games using simulation and strategy through action. Their flagship product is Falcon III, a aircraft fighter game "Ours are known as the highest end," said Scott Blankenship, who helped develop the game and add-on products, including Mig 29, Hornet and Operation Fighting Tiger.
MicroPro is currently working on Falcon 4.0 and to maintain quality, make sure the game runs true and, incidentally, help with the 500-page manual that comes with the simulation, the company has an in-house F-16 pilot, one of several ex-military employees that help develop games. Greg Kearney, senior software engineer for Maxis EA, a company recently purchased by Electronic Arts, helped develop Sim City, a city building simulation game.
Overcoming technical challenges is his job. "Somebody sat down and said 'I want a game that models cities and how they interact.' I sit down and figure out what are the important aspects of a city, the next phase is to get the core concepts down, then say, 'how do I make this fun,'" Kearny said.
"When that's all done, you hand it over to a software engineer who looks at how you want the game to play and be, and turns it into a technical version of the same game," he added. Expectations are still ahead of the technology and Kearney is rarely able to satisfy all the conceptual hopes of designers. "They usually want more than we can do," more than is technically possible, he said.
"There's a round-robin, a couple of iterations and then finally the game design sort of matches currently technology," he added. To stay ahead of the pack, Kearney encourages good work discipline. The best thing Maxis does is hire good people, he said. "From there those people find innovative solutions to what ever technical challenge comes up," he added
Gaming companies update their best-selling programs as technology advances. The third version of Sim City is due to be released this fall. "There has been a major graphics update, the game takes you closer into the city compared to the way it used to be and the actual model has gotten a major overhaul so there are lots more things you can do with the city simulator itself," said Kearney.
More importantly, Maxis has pushed the envelope with the new version. "A major architectural piece is you can dynamically change it. Other programmers, after we ship, can add new stuff to the simulator and the graphics engine or to other pieces," he said.
Setting up a game to be altered by the user is unusual. "It's a rather new thing that's just happened. Its kind of a new software technology," Kearny said, and part of that adaptable programming is due to the number of program-savvy users and a progression of software in general, going to a more "component" or add-on mentality or architecture.
"We bit the bullet and architected the program to enable that." To keep it's edge as a top game maker Electronic Arts, mother company of Maxis, does a couple of things. Like all game companies, they invest in the insight of people who play the games, both real and virtual. As time has gone on that has become somewhat easier, said Hilleman. "I run into people now who were high school kids who played John Madden Football. Those guys now are helping us make this round of football games," he said.
EA also uses technical innovations. The company sends out a group to each golf course being replicated to record data to be used in the game. They map the courses with the Global Position System commercially available for marine and land navigation. "This gives elevation and surface data on each hole of the course. At the same time, others in the group take photographs to make textures and objects and flags and ducks that are on the seventeenth hole. Every object that give the place character, they capture and we make some version of that which will show up in the game," said Hilleman.
"We've gone out and spent the time to learn how to do that GPS stuff, for instance. I won't have that advantage forever. One of things you learn about high technology is once you have an advantage that doesn't mean you get to sit back," he added.
Think about this next time you see a golf game on a video screen: Hilleman will have twenty people working 14 months on the game and guessed the average user will play it for 20-40 hours. For every hour each buyer uses the game, EA developers will work for over 1000 hours. "These are people that bring dream worlds to life," Hilleman said.