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well, crap...

7/25/2014

Just a quick followup to my last post ("Sometimes, it's a small small world")... I made the mistake of telling my wife about meeting the Z2Live guy. "What an amazing coincidence, huh??? Right???"

Instead of being amused (or amazed) her response was: "So you LIED to me???"

Uh oh.

When I got home from work later that night I knew I was in trouble. She kept asking questions about my job, my life, our relationship, and she responded to all of my answers by wondering whether I was telling the truth or not.

Then, the next morning, we had the following conversation:

MELANIE
I'm sorry about last night, I overreacted.

JOHN
That's okay, don't worry about it.

BZZZZZZZT!!!!

ANNOUNCER
I'm sorry, that was not the answer we were
looking for... The correct answer was, "No, no. It was my fault. I should not have lied to you."

<sigh>

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sometimes, It's a small small world

7/23/2014

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Yesterday, I called my wife to ask for our bank account information.  Melanie, who worries more than any ten people I know, is immediately suspicious.  I explain that Big Fish is now using a service called "Concur" for expense reports and they need routing numbers and stuff to wire money into our account.

She's still panicking.  "How did you find out about all of this???"  I tell her I just got an e-mail from a man named "Shamus" who is the Senior Accounting Manager. She then asks, "Are you SURE he works at the company???"  I tell her I'm POSITIVE, then I check our directory.

Not found.  There is no Shamus at Big Fish.

Crap.

There's no way I can tell my wife that... so I lie to her.  "Yes, he's in our directory. He works here."

I have to admit that I got a little nervous when I couldn't find the guy's name, but the e-mail was sent awhile ago so I figured he just left the company.

That all happened yesterday afternoon.  This morning I'm standing with some guy at the bus stop near my house and after a few minutes we strike up a conversation. He tells me he works at a Vancouver developer called Z2Live (makers of "Trade Nations" and "Battle Nations").  I tell him I work at Big Fish Games and he says, "Oh yeah, I know Big Fish.  In fact, I recently hired a Senior Account Manager from there named Shamus Williams."

True story. What are the odds???

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i would not have approved "diablo"

7/1/2014

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I hear a lot of game design pitches and my feedback is often a shrug of the shoulders. A few ideas are clearly superior and I get very excited about them, and a few are SO bad that I can easily shake my head and say, "No, that is a terrible game concept." But often I just shrug my shoulders, because great concepts and terrible concepts all require one thing to be successful: execution.

I sometimes use the original "Diablo" to explain my position on this topic. Before I learned the importance of execution I honestly believe that I would NOT have approved that pitch. I think the conversation would have gone like this:

DIABLO DESIGNER
Diablo will be an in-depth RPG with great action and special effects!!

JOHN CUTTER
(thinking about the Ultima Series and games like "Daggerfall")
An RPG... okay... that could be interesting. So there will be a large fantasy world with dozens of towns, each offering a unique cultural --

DIABLO DESIGNER
Uh. No. Not really. There is only one town.

JOHN CUTTER
One town??? Okay, but it's a HUGE town with tons of explorable buildings and --

DIABLO DESIGNER
Errr. Well, no, actually the town only has a few buildings... and you can't actually go inside any of them. But there's a dungeon --

JOHN CUTTER
Oh, it's a dungeon romp game!! So there are dozens of intricate dungeons, each with
lots of huge levels --

DIABLO DESIGNER
Sorry. One dungeon. 16 levels. And it's not real intricate because the layout of each level is randomly generated.

JOHN CUTTER
(really searching now)
You can be any kind of character, right?

DIABLO DESIGNER
Only 3 choices.

JOHN CUTTER
Quests?

DIABLO DESIGNER
Not really, no.

JOHN CUTTER
You're going to use the latest 3D techn--

DIABLO DESIGNER
2D. Isometric.

JOHN CUTTER
(pointing to the door)
NEXT!

My point is, the game was so well executed the pitch was kind of irrelevant. But stories like that make it difficult for me to judge other games, because there are lots of really horrible game concepts out there, but many of them could be successful, possibly hugely successful, with the proper execution by a talented individual or team.

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well, crap...

sometimes, It's a small small world

i would not have approved "diablo"

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