Warhorse Studios RPG Developers Blog

Warhorse Studios’ Dan Vávra has penned a new blog entry for the development of their open world RPG, which so far hasn’t been shown to the public or even officially announced yet. Company disagreements and pre-demo anxiety are the focus this time:

PIECE OF CAKE

In our case the catalyst of the tension was the video. We decided to go beyond a mere collection of in-game shots and top it off with an action-packed intro outlining the plot of our game. At the same time, we didn’t want the video to be too difficult to make. I wrote the screenplay several months ago, the animations were mostly recorded in the motion capture session, and we didn’t forget about voiceovers so it was going to be a piece of cake. Not completely.

We discussed our options for putting it all together with respect to our time and resources, I drew a simple storyboard and artists as well as animators set out to work. We have good artists and animators and so I was pretty sure everything was going to turn out well and went on with my PowerPoint wizardry. When I saw the first draft shots in a few days, I was aghast. (This doesn’t look next-gen, guys!) (Why? It’s exactly as you wanted it!) (But the lighting is all weird and the shots are too long and boring.) (The shots are exactly as they are in the storyboard!) (That may be so, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t cut a long shot with a different one. It just didn’t occur to me when I was drawing it!) (But I did it exactly the way you wanted it!) (All right, but can’t we re-cut it somehow? And we should do something with the lighting, it looks like a faded video.) (I like it the way it is.) (But if we re-cut it, it’s definitely going to be better. Can you please do it?) (I don’t know how, so either tell me exactly how to do it or you can do it yourself.) And the atmosphere around the office grows thicker. Opinions differ occasionally and somebody has to make a decision (by virtue of my position it should be me), somebody is bound to disagree completely and, unwittingly, a conflict is born. I have lot of experience with that, I used to be a ruthless angry boss riding roughshod over other people’s feelings to get what I wanted. This can be a good short-term strategy or it may work under some very special circumstances, but it’s counterproductive from the long-term perspective. So I try to do the exact opposite now: getting reasonable, consensual people that are good at what they’re doing. It makes for fewer opportunities to get angry, but from time to time it just doesn’t work anyway.

IT’S TOTALLY CLEAR! IS IT?

Sometimes the root of a disagreement is a simple misunderstanding. I have a very specific idea how a thing should look, I explain it as best I can, I make pictures, supply photos of how it should look but the other party understands it in their own way and as a result, when they deliver what is, from their viewpoint perfect work, they feel understandably irritated when I have a feeling that they created something completely different from what we agreed upon. This is ‘˜wrong’.

In this situation it always boils down to how specific the original idea was and how to approach a different (not necessarily worse) result. Once I showed the artists a shot from an older movie and noticed that I like its lighting and colors. However, I didn’t make myself clear enough and the result was almost the exact opposite of what I wanted. The artist thought I was pulling his leg and I felt exactly the same way about him. It would have been enough, though, to specify the OBJECT in that shot the color of which I liked, instead of saying I LIKE THE COLOR OF THIS SHOT.

Things like that cannot be avoided with creative work like making videogames. You can limit it somewhat by making very detailed specifications, but this will make the creative people feel they have no freedom, they won’t like what they’re doing, will deliver poorer results and finally leave the company for a place that would allow them to express themselves better. Or you can give your colleagues just a rough sketch and leave the rest to their creativity. The result can be something so awesome you wouldn’t be able to dream about it much less to describe it, because your artist is understandably much better at what he’s doing than you are and his work will be better than your idea. Or the exact opposite happens and the result is something quite unutterable, because the artist, genius as he may be, did not understand your idea at all and went off on some weird tangent. When this happens, you have to have him redo it and this will probably anger him more than a too strict specification would have.