Click Nothing

'...and let slip the blogs of war!'

So I didn't really want to muddy up the stats we were collecting and tracking for this during the actual development of it, but for those who never found it, we were maintaining a fictional blog for the character of the journalist Reuben Oluwagembi who you meet in Far Cry 2.

The blog was loosely conceived by myself, LP (the producer), Pat Redding, and the writer Kevin Shortt. Once we got the concept nailed down, Kevin mostly handled it by himself and did an excellent job keeping it real, managing the voice of the character, and building a rising tension that would lead into the start of the game such that the world described in the blog on the launch date of the game would be the world the player finds himself in when he started to play. It also develops some interesting backstory for the warlords Mbantuwe and Tambossa and sets the stage for the collection of the "Jackal Tapes" scattered around the game world (all of which are available to listen to on the blog if you didn;t find them all in-game).

In support of the writing, Kevin also worked with Stefan Koziol, one of our artists to do some photoshopping and image compositing on photos the guys took while they were in Kenya. This ties back to some of the reference material we used for actual buildings in the game and gives the whole blog a kind of hyperreal quality that I love.

There were a quite a few regulars showing up, leaving comments and - for the most part - participating in the fiction we were creating. A few of them (judging both from posted comments and from some emails sent to 'Reuben') even seemed to mistake it for a real blog from a real war correspondant on the ground in our fictional African country.

Anyway, I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible. Even though we're definitely not the first to try such a thing, I think you learn the most by doing, and there are definitely some lessons we can take away from this that will help us in the future.

The Nine of Spades

If you like to gamble, I tell you I'm your man.
You win some, lose some, it's all the same to me.
The pleasure is to play, it makes no difference what you say,
I don't share your greed, the only card I need is,
The nine of spades!
The nine of spades!

Okay, so it doesn't have quite the same punch as the Motorhead version, and there's no question I'm no Rob Pardo, but in the November 2008 issue of Game Developer Magazine (the one with Age of Booty on the cover) I was listed as the (villainous?) Nine of Spades in the 'Top Deck'... which makes me the game development equivalent of this dude.

(Note that in the photo he is either winking at the photographer (probably hitting on her) or he is missing an eye... either of which indicates probable promotion to 10 or even Jack of Spades in the near future, I'd say. Watch out Tim Sweeney!)

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that they listed me among the 'Trailblazers' - and even more interesting that they did so with reference to the fire propagation system in Far Cry 2 (which while awesome, was not really the system we were most trying to innovate with). Technically, I suppose I kind of designed it (or worked with the team that designed it), but honestly I'm not even sure if it was my idea, and in any case, the one who really blazed the trail, virtually and now metaphorically, was JF Levesque. For the record, the anecdote they relate in the magazine is fictitious (as far as I know), and although there are several real anecdotes (one of them is from JF in the linked article) relating to out of control wildfires none of them ever killed the Jackal by accident.

More curious though, was why they didn't list me among the 'Progressives'. That's more or less how I perceive myself... I'm not the big idea guy here, I'm just doing what folks who made great games before me said I should do. In any case, this is the not first time I have seen the term 'Progressive' pop-up in the classification of developers. The first time I saw it was a couple years ago when Steve Gaynor over at Fullbright wrote this really interesting article about what he called the 'progressive school of game design'. If you're interested in this stuff, you should read it.