10 Game Industry Questions - Joseph Hewitt

10 Questions from Yug - Thursday, 19 April 2007 @ 2:51pm

Fullname: Joseph B. Hewitt IV Nickname: What, like aliases? You doing an interview or is this some sort of interrogation? Why would you think I had aliases? I mean I kinda do, but that’s not the point. Sentris & Dymion (two character names I use the most) and Arrion (R-Re-On which was my magician stage name and BBS handle). Gender: Male Age: 39 Current Company: Auran Games Current Project: Fury Gaming Systems Owned: Various Pong systems, Vectrex, Odyssey, Atari 2600, Sinclair Spectrum, Colecovision, Intellivision, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, NEC TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis, Super NES, Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64, XBox, Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo Game Cube, Nintendo Gameboy, Nintendo Gameboy Advanced, Nintendo DS.

1. What is your job role where you work and can you explain what it entails?

I am a senior game designer at Auran Games currently working on the upcoming MMO PvP game Fury. I write design documents for various game systems, mostly social. I also design graphic user interfaces and am forced through daily beatings to draw the 400+ ability icons that are in the game.

So what does a game designer do? I think a lot of people don’t really understand what a game designer does. I think there is some vague idea that we just sit around and think of cool high concept ideas or play with level editors.

Game designers hardly ever get to come up with a game concept. There are other people that decide what kind of game the company will create, people like the company owners, creative directors and so on. They are the people that get to think of things on a high concept level. I have plenty of ideas for a game that I doubt that I will ever get to create. The truth is if you want to be the guy who comes up with the high concept game design, start your own game company.

Well then what do most game designers do? We are the people who have to take that high concept game idea and flesh it out in exacting detail. Not just ‘in detail' but ‘in exacting detail’. Don’t get me wrong though; there is still a lot of creativity that needs to be put into those exacting details.

Looking at Fury in high concept we have “a fast-paced MMO game that just focuses on MMO style PvP but still has the social systems, loot acquisition, and player economy features found in RPG MMO games.”

The specifics that we game designers and other team members create are that it is instance based arena PvP combat, different realms compete against each other so everybody on your realm is your friend, there are guilds, groups, friends list, all items are tradable, there is an auction house, etc.

The details are every bit of exacting minutia on how it all works. You can’t just say, “your character has an inventory” you have to write up exactly what an inventory is, how its displayed and what the player can do with it. There is a whole lot of writing that goes into those design specs and you have to assume that the artist and programmer who is going to read it has never played this type of game and have no idea what you are talking about.

Think about your inventory in your favorite RPG game and if you have a lot of free time, try writing up a game design document that describes how it works.

First you have to describe the interface layout and include a rough mock-up. You need to break it down into parts describing each section, like the title bar, inventory slots, money display, buttons and anything else it displays.

Each of the sections needs to have its behavior described precisely. Everything that happens if you right click on something, left click it, click and drag it, mouse-over it or poke it with a stick. Everything needs to be written up with every possible case scenario. Every piece of text that needs to be displayed on the interface or as feedback to the user in his chat window needs to be defined as a text string to go into the database.

Just think of all the ways items are displayed in your inventory. Some examples: items you can’t use being displayed in red, items that are ‘cooling down’ from the last time they were used having a clock-like grayscale sweep effect. Items that stack having a stack count. Does your game have wear and tear on item and is there some visual indicator of that on the item? Do items that are tradable look different than items that can’t be traded?

Now think of all the things you can do with items in your inventory, moving them around, swapping items, activating them, consuming them, equipping them, and dragging them to other interface windows or on top of other players (drag and drop trade, forgot that one didn’t you). How do you destroy items and what kind of warnings do you get before it actually destroys the item? You have to detail all of that by defining the standard behavior and writing out how it handles every single case that could possibly happen.

The most important part is trying to eliminate as many edge cases as you can and define how the interface handles those that you can’t. Edge cases are exceptions that can fall outside of the normal case scenarios. For example let’s say you can right click on items to get a context menu with an option to delete the item. What happens if you put the item in a trade or vendor window and then try to delete it? You specifically have to define the behavior of what happens in that case. Basically you are not so much as trying to make it foolproof as handling all the foolish things people might do. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Now once you get your design document written up just perfectly, proofread by your peers, submitted to programming and art for approval, gone through implementation meetings, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters; you sit back and wait till something else in the game changes causes you’ll have to completely rewrite the entire thing. If you aren’t asked to redo something at least 3 times, chances are it has been cut from the game and nobody has told you yet.

That last line isn’t a joke unfortunately. It’s one of those sad truths that you laugh at on the outside but cry about on the inside.



2. What games have you been directly involved with previously?

Okay… here goes:

Westwood Studios:

• AD&D DragonStrike – PC, Amiga
• AD&D DragonStrike – NES
• AD&D Eye of the Beholder – PC, Amiga
• AD&D Eye of the Beholder II – PC
• AD&D Hillsfar – PC, C64
• AD&D Order of the Giffon – NEC Turbo Graphics
• AD&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun – Genesis
• Ancient Glory – (unreleased) PC
• Battletech: Crescent Hawk’s Inception – PC, C64, AppleII, Amiga
• Battletech II: Crescent Hawk’s Revenge – PC
• Body Count (cancelled) – Genesis
• Circuit’s Edge – PC
• Command & Conquer – PC, Win95, Mac
• Command & Conquer – Covert Ops (add-on) PC
• Command & Conquer – Windows Theme Pack PC
• Command & Conquer – Playstation, Saturn, N64
• Command & Conquer: Retaliation – Playstation
• Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor – PC Internet
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert – PC
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Counter Strike (add-on) – PC
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Aftermath (add-on) – PC
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Windows Theme Pack – PC
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Playstation
• Command & Conquer II: Tiberian Sun – PC
• Command & Conquer II: Tiberian Sun Firestorm (add-on) – PC
• Command & Conquer: Generals (German) – PC
• Disney’s Donald’s Alphabet Chase – PC, C64, Apple II
• Disney’s Goofy’s Railroad Express – PC, C64
• Disney’s Micky’s Runaway Zoo – PC, C64
• Disney’s The Lion King – SNES, Genesis
• Dune 2000 – Playstation
• Dune II – PC
• Earth and Beyond – PC MMORPG
• Kyrandia – PC
• Kyrandia II: The Hand of Fate – PC
• Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos – PC
• Lands of Lore II: Guardians of Destiny – PC
• MegaWICE Utility – PC
• Monopoly – PC, Mac
• Nightmare on Elm Street – PC, C64
• Pacmania – NES
• Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat – PS2 & Xbox
• The Mars Saga – C64
• The Mines of Titan – PC, Apple II
• Vindicators (unreleased) – PC, Apple IIGS
• Vindicators – NES
• Westwood Chat – PC, Mac
• Young Merlin – SNES

Unicorn Software:

• Aesop’s Fables – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• All About America – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS
• Animal Kingdom – C-64, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Decimal Dungeon – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Fraction Action – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Ghostly Grammar – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Jumble Jet – C-64
• Kinderama – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Land of the Unicorn – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS, IBM-PC
• Macrobots – Mac
• Magical Myths – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Percentage Panic – C-64, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Phonics Fun – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Read and Rhyme – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Read-A-Rama – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• Tales from the Arabian Nights – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• The Adventures of Sinbad – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS
• The Logic Master – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple, Apple IIGS, Mac
• The Math Wizard – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS
• The Word Master – Atari ST, Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Mac
• Utopia – Mac

I was also a Customer Service Representative for Star Wars Galaxies for about 8 months at launch. This was between Westwood and Auran while I was trying to get onto the Everquest development team.

I get the occasional recognition about working on Dune II and the Command & Conquer series and oddly enough for the past few years I have been getting emails about Eye of the Beholder. But what seems to get people the most excited is when they find out I did the logo for Thottbot. When I first did the logo I used to go out of my way to tell people that I did it, but now I’m almost afraid that people will find out because they make such a big deal out of it. Seriously, each of those games represents about 8-12 months of work if not more, and that logo was just a few hours of experimentation with fonts while watching TV. If I had known it was going to be such a big deal I would have put more effort into it!



3. How did you get your start in the gaming industry?

Back in the dawn of time now commonly called the mid 80’s I started going to an after school tutoring place called “Computer Tutors” which also published educational software under the company name of “Unicorn Software.”

The guy that was doing their art for them had just vanished. Vanished as in call the police and put his picture on a milk carton. Seriously, no joke. As it turned out a few years later, nothing had actually happened to him, he just went on ‘walkabout’ as the Aussies say. He was a strange guy.

Anyway, they offered me the job of doing the art for “Animal Kingdom” on the Commodore 64 for which they paid me with an $80 Koala pad, which was a drawing tablet for the C64. Had I been old and wise enough at the time to realize what a bad deal that was, things probably would have turned out quite differently for me. As it did turn out I moved to California for my senior year of high school but came back the day after I graduated and started working for Unicorn full time as an artist, game designer, and teacher for Computer Tutors. I was there about 2 years before I realized that I was being taken advantage of. I got all my stuff together and presented the owners with an ultimatum. They said okay, we could work this out and I returned to my office and unpacked my stuff. Then about an hour later my boss comes in and says he changed his mind, this wouldn’t work for him so if I was planning on leaving I should go now. So I did.

Honestly, I figured that was it. I never really expected to work in the game industry--it would have been like saying, “oh and I want to be a movie star”. You want it, but you don’t expect it to come true. I thought that was my 5 minutes of fame and now I was going to have to get a real job. I even cut my hair so I would look presentable for job interviews.

I had just started hanging out on a local multi-user BBS system at the time called Multi-Com. One of the guys I met online named Milo was throwing a birthday party for his girlfriend and inviting online to come. So having just been dumped by my girlfriend who ran off with the guy who worked at the comic store (yes, I lost my job, my girlfriend, and my nerdy comic-book hobby at the same time) I had nothing better to do, so I went. Milo tells me that he has friend who also used to work at Unicorn, having quit just weeks before I had started going there as a student, and this guy had started his own game company. He stressed over and over that is was a ‘real’ game company, not crappy educational games.

Now of course I’m just nodding my head the whole time, ‘real game company… yeah… well golly gee that sounds great… no really I believe you.” But I did give him my number. A few days later I get a call from Brett Sperry, president of Westwood Associates (later to become Westwood Studios) who had me come down for an interview.

I didn’t have anything to show him, not a thing. I tried going back to Unicorn because they were supposed to give me a copy of every game I worked on but I was told that they worked on a contract basis and since I couldn’t produce a contract to say as much, there was nothing he could do. I’m making this sound all corporate like, but Unicorn was a guy and his wife who I’m not naming because I’m trying to be nice. It was 20 years ago. I rode by their office years later and the stained glass unicorn window makes a nice entrance for the dentist office that is there now.

Brett later told me that he didn’t have a lot of expectations from me and hired because he felt sorry for me having gone through the Unicorn thing. But that was 1988 and I stayed with them till EA started the layoffs shutting down the company in 2002.


4. What has been the most positive experience of working in the games industry so far?

Making good games, listening to people talk about how much fun they had playing some game I had a hand in creating. I just love having people tell me stories about playing the games I’ve worked on.

I had one guy tell me that when he first unlocked the teleporting portals in Eye of the Beholder that he was so excited he woke up his roommate at 2 AM and the two of them stayed up all night to finish the game. Of course he did go on to say that after they finished it they fell asleep and missed an important college exam and almost flunked the class.



5. What has been the most negative experience of working in the games industry so far?

It was my last day at Westwood. I had seen a limo parked out behind the building earlier that day and a few of us were speculating that one of the vice-presidents from our parent company was in the office but oddly enough nobody had seen him.

I was sitting in the board room having Louis tell a group of us that we were being let go when I realized two things. The first thing was that the VP had come into town to oversee the layoffs and he had taken a limo from the airport instead of taxi. The second was realizing that not only was I being let go from this company that had been such a big part of my life for 14 years; but knowing that this same company that had done such wonderful games would probably be shut down completely within a year (which it was).

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6. What advice can you give to other people looking to get into a position such as yours?

It is very unlikely that you are going to accidentally fall into the industry. Those days are pretty much over. The video games industry is big business now. If you want to get into the industry these days, you first have to be serious about it.

Go to college and study things related to what you want to do in the industry. I’m not talking one of those ‘game schools’ either. Those places are good to help you get taste of what goes on in making games but if you want to be taken seriously you’ll want a college degree. I’d recommend studying programming, creative writing, history, and some serious math. Can you explain in detail the pro’s and con’s of linear progression versus exponential progression for your RPG’s experience system?

Second, get something to show. If you’re a programmer, get involved with a serious mod-group and produce something. Want to be a designer? There are many games out there that come with editors that let you build your own levels. Writer? Then write something. Artist? Maya personal learning edition is pretty cheap. Start creating something. Show what you can do.



7. How do you see Australia as a market when compared to the rest of the world?

As a market for games? I think the only thing that isn’t as good here that is better in other parts of the world is the state of the Australian internet. I was floored 3 years ago when I moved here and learned that all the packages are shaped/capped bandwidth. Even the top end internet packages that are labeled as ‘unlimited’ still throttle your speed if you exceed your bandwidth limit. In the U.S. you can get unlimited internet that is really unlimited and a hell of lot faster for $40 bucks a month. I’m still waiting for Telstra to put in the DSLAM so I can get higher DLS2 speeds.



8. Got any good stories you want to share?

I don’t know I’ve already rambled on quite a bit and I am starting to get a reputation at work. Just the other day I was telling somebody something and James walked up and said “Am I missing Joseph Story Time?”

But I know I’m not going to get out of here without some story, so let me think…

-The Westwood Lie-

When I first started at Westwood I was told a story about how Matt Owl had done a back-flip off the balcony rail onto the roof. The story goes that Brett and Louis were out of town and while they were away the staff did play -- with paper airplanes in the courtyard. Several of these paper airplanes wound up on the roof and they knew that when Brett and Louis got back, they would see them up on the roof and know that everybody had been goofing off. So Matt did a standing hop onto the balcony rail, then with a mighty wind-up did a back-flip into the air and onto the roof.

The thing with the Westwood Lie was that everybody knew the Westwood Lie. If you asked anybody else about it, they already knew the story.

“Hey do you know about the time Matt Owl…”

“Did a back-flip onto the roof?! Yeah that was amazing!”

Every new employee was subjected to this story while Westwood was in that office building. You were told the lie when you started, it was allowed to drag out for a few days, then everybody would have a friendly laugh and you were expected to toe the line for the next new guy. The story was true about the paper airplanes, only they found the roof access panel in one of the bathrooms and crawled up through there to get them down. Also the roof extended a little further out than the railing so even if he were a martial arts expert, there was no way Matt could have pulled that off.

This story is really good since when I first started working at Sony Online Entertainment and was trying to get all chummy with the Everquest team, one of them found out that I had come from Westwood. He took me aside and asked, “Hey is it true that a guy from Westwood once got up on the railing…”

“And did a back-flip onto the roof?! Yeah that was amazing!”

And as an addition to that story: It became a tradition for a few years to have paper airplane contest during our Christmas parties. The goal was to make a paper airplane that would fly the farthest off the balcony. One year it was especially windy and I knew that the planes weren’t going to go that far. So I make one of those paper footballs, you know where you fold the paper up into a tight little triangle, and decorated it with a marker to look like a stealth bomber. I kept it hidden so nobody could see what I was up to. When my turn came I took it out of my pocket and flung it off the balcony completely out distancing all the previous planes, most of which had been caught by the wind and blown backwards over the building. To this day I see old friends at conventions at stuff who only stop me in the hall long enough to say, “It’s not a plane!” Either that or “man up!” which is a whole other story I’d rather not tell.



9. What are your favourite games and why?

I love the old Infocom text adventures. I am a big fan of the Monkey Island series.

I will always have an MMO game of some sort on the top of my list and that is currently World of Warcraft. I am kind of looking forward to being old and in a nursing home, because I figure by then the technology will have advanced to the point where they can just plug us into a VR online game full time.



10. If you could meet any gaming character in real life, who would it be and why?

Mario. I need to have a talk with that guy about his girlfriend. Really after all these times she has been kidnapped by Bowzer you have to ask, is she really being kidnapped or does she maybe have a thing for him? Is she just with Mario because he’s rich and famous? Is there some sort of abusive three way love triangle going on here? Could counseling help?