Interview with Ron Carmel, Game Development Camp 2009

N-club: First of all, thank you for the interview. We would like to ask you, why create something like World of Goo? What was your inspiration?
Ron Carmel: The inspiration for World of Goo is a game called Tower of Goo, which Kyle (the other half of 2D Boy) wrote in 2005 when he was in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon. Initially we were going to make a different game based on the life of a tree over 100 years, but we saw that somebody else made a copy of Tower of Goo and we decided that it was time to make a better version.

N-club: Why leave a big company as Electronic Arts with a lot of capital behind their projects, and start all over by yourself with only a few people and very little money?
Ron Carmel: Both Kyle and I have always wanted to make games on our own, and to make all the greater decisions. That's something we really couldn't do with EA, we were always doing something that was part of another project or the design was already set, and then we were just doing engineering. It's just an idea that was compelling to both of us. So as soon as we started talking about it we got really excited, and even though we didn't know each other really well when we decided to quit and do this, we just both were so excited so – we just left!

N-club: So it's a way to get your own vision out and not necessarily have to pay attention to other's projects?
Ron Carmel: Yes, we want to be both the designers, the programmers and the artists and do everything ourselves and have full control over what we do and just do what we want to do, rather than what somebody else wants us to do.

N-club: What challenges do you see in making a game almost by yourself compared to be in a big company?
Ron Carmel: Being in a big company is really comfortable, because when I was a programmer in a big company, all I had to do was program, and that was it! I didn't have to worry about anything else. As a part of a smaller team I do programming, production, quality assurance, manage play testing, business development and legal work with contracts. It's a lot of stuff that I need to balance. Kyle composes the music, makes the art, does the level design, game design, takes care of the website, and wrote the export scripts. So we each have a lot of stuff to do. That's a little bit difficult to juggle. And then, once the game releases, we handled support on top of that, which is yet another big effort that, y'know, would be nice to have more people to handle. Another thing is, when you're working for Electronic Arts you're getting a salary, and you've got nothing to worry about. When making your own game, for two years we worked without any income and living off our savings, and it was getting really stressful to see all our money running out. Those are the difficulties working in that kind of style.

N-club: You've stated earlier on your blog that you only expected one out of every tenth copy of the PC version of World of Goo to be legitimately purchased. Do you think this keeps indie teams from ever starting out? This idea that your game may not be purchased by that many people?
Ron Carmel: I'm sure some teams think that way, but I'm convinced that's wrong. People who pirate games don't look for the game on their favorite bittorrent site and if they can't find it say "Okay, I'm gonna buy it". They either play it, or they don't play it. Reflexive, the company that makes casual games, did some studies on how much their counter piracy efforts generates sales. They also had piracy around 90 percent; I think this is kinda standard for PC games. They found that for every thousand cases of piracy they prevent, it resulted in one additional sale. That goes to support my intuition about people either buy it or don't buy it. I don't think piracy does anything to harm sales, but it certainly affects the amount of people who'll play your game through word of mouth.

N-club: So really, piracy could be a good thing for your game in terms of free publicity?
Ron Carmel: Yes, it could definitely be a good thing. Certainly leading to more people playing your game, more people hear about it. We've gotten e-mails too from people saying: "Hey, I pirated your game, but I also bought it for my brother for Christmas!" Don't get me wrong, I'm not encouraging people to go pirate games, but it's certainly not as bad as some people make it up to be.

N-club: What do you think of the Danish Game Development Camp 2009, or camps like it?
RC: I think it's great. Games are very new medium of expression. They only really became popular during the 80's and 90's I think. There's still alot of room for growth, it certainly hasn't reached the level of art that film, literature and paintings have, and I don't see that level of masterwork coming out of EA or Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard. I think the advancement of games as a medium comes from young people with fresh minds without preconceived ideas of what is possible and what is impossible. These are the kinds of people who come to the game camps, and eventually one of these people will make contributions to the field, so I think it's important to encourage people to get into this field and to experiment, explore and see what's possible.

N-club: We're hearing that you're developing a game yourself this week?
Ron Carmel: Yeah, so... We got very burned out towards the end of World of Goo, and we needed to take some time off. Just last month or so we started prototyping again, so I'm going to prototype a game in seven days, and see if anything comes out of it, but my expectations are that, because 90 percent of everything is crap, that this one will be crap as well.

N-club: Did you have any initial inspiration for this week?
Ron Carmel: No, we just picked a theme for every month to develop a game around that theme, and the theme for this month is going to be 'failure'.

N-club: So if it's not the case that this game is going to be crap, then what?
Ron Carmel: Then it will be the next big hit!

N-club: Since we are part of the Nintendo community we were wondering what your look on Nintendo is? Where do you see Nintendo in the market today?
Ron Carmel: Clearly, I don't think anyone will dispute that Nintendo made a very smart move with the Wii, and the focus on introducing new methods of interaction between the player and the console really opened up a lot of possibilities for new games. I think it's the same kind of thing Apple did with the iPhone, which is also extremely popular. Nintendo has also been very supportive of everything we did and they helped us getting World of Goo into WiiWare in North America, Europe and Japan. From what I've heard, we're the first western developer to deal directly with Nintendo of Japan for WiiWare, without any publisher in the middle, so we're honored by that as well and with the appreciation the game received over there as well.

N-club: What do you think the future perspective is of the next generation of gaming consoles? Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are putting more focus at motion control. Do you think this is the future instead of choosing to focus graphics and other hardcore elements?
Ron Carmel: I think graphics is a dead end. We're already so close to visual realism. Yes, it can always be more visually realistic, but how much does it contribute to the experience of the player? Maybe at some point when the graphics are so good you can't tell it apart from reality and the CPU is so powerful and simulation is so advanced that you can actually truly have interactions with artificial humans in a game – then, maybe then, but again that's not about graphics. It's about processing power and the advancement in computer science and artificial intelligence. But clearly, input methods have shown that there's ways that people haven't thought before. Beyond that, I don't know what the future holds.

N-club: Nowadays gamers are typically grouped into two segments: casual and hardcore. Do you see a future market for both segments? Or will we see a shift towards casual gamers, reducing the amount of hardcore games developed?
Ron Carmel: That's another large difference between a large company and a small separate studio. A large company has to figure out what the market is and where the money is coming from and where their audience is and the cater to that audience. Therefore, the notion of hardcore and casual gamers is really important to the larger companies. With smaller teams I think people just create the games that they wanna play. They have a vision or inspiration for something they think is cool, and they go and make it. Maybe some people will buy it and maybe some people won't, but it's more of an expression of what they love rather than an expression of "we want to make the most money". Look at Cactus for example. He makes the games for free, he clearly does what he wants and what he likes – I don't think he thinks about if it's casual or hardcore. We also don't need to generate that much income in a smaller company, compared to Electronic Arts where, if the game doesn't sell a million copies it's a failure – and they lose money. We don't have any expenses, so we just need the fee for our time, really.

N-club: Microsoft has released the XNA Framework for the Xbox 360, Apple has released SDK to the public, and made the AppStore somewhat public available to hobbyists. Should Nintendo make WiiWare open to hobbyist developers as well?
Ron Carmel: In my mind... Yes. What none of the companies have gotten quite right is, that they do want to keep some level of control over the decision process of what gets on there and what doesn't. In order to get on Xbox Live Arcade, you have to get green light and very few people get that kind of approval. For Community Games, which I think they just re-named to Indie Games, there is a peer review which I think is much closer to the model that I think the industry should be going to. With the AppStore they still review every application before you put it out. I think the focus should be more on less review on each application and more on a system where everybody can put whatever they want on and not limit it – to take themselves out of the equation. That raises a whole bunch of other concerns about what is appropriate content and inappropriate content, and how would people perceive the iPhone if there was pornography on the iPhone? How would Nintendo look at the games on Wii if they didn't have any control on what people could do with the games? Clearly, the larger companies aren't ready to handle the legal ramifications on that yet. In the end, I think it's inevitable. On PC, everybody can make whatever they like and I don't see a lot of people cry or making complaints or filing lawsuits against the PC manufacturers for having inappropriate material on their computers.

N-club: What should young people who want to make games, do in order to reach their goals?
Ron Carmel: Make games. I think there's two main ways for people to get to work in the game industry. One of them is simply being an independent developer and making games and trying to make a living off of them. The other one is to get a job at a larger company. Making games is good for both of them. If you make games for yourself then you are an independent developer. If you want to get a job at a larger company then you need a résumé and a cover letter and stuff like that to get into the door, but the most impressive thing you can show your future employer is a game you've made yourself. It doesn't have to be big huge games with big 3D graphics. It can be a very small and simple game. As long as it is well executed and you can show that you have a good sense of design, meaning that you can discuss the design choices intelligently, that will impress an employer more than any kind of résumé you can show them.

N-club: So in your opinion you don't really need an education within the field of game development? Just the passion to make games?
Ron Carmel: Yeah, if you show someone something what you made, then even if you didn't graduate high-school, then... They might look at your code to make sure it's not a total disaster, but... Yeah.

N-club: Thanks for your time!

Artiklen er skrevet af Bjarne Brunsgaard Søndag d. 2. august 2009 klokken 23:45

Nyeste artikler