Using Contracted Game Development: Wideload Games

[Evangolis]

So the IDGA chapter in Chicago this year has been doing meetings about once a quarter, focusing on getting high quality presentations from generally the president level of development firms, such as Denny Thorley (Day 1 Studios) and Lorne Lanning (Oddworld Inhabitants).  Last night the final speaker of this year was Alex Seropian, founder of Wideload Games, formerly of Bungie Studios, who spoke about the development model Wideload used to produce their first title, Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse.

Seropian, like most of the speakers this year, is very concerned with the current environment for developers.  While Thorley presented Day 1 Studios’ approach as simply gutting it out in the current system and attempting to grow and diversify internally, and Lanning has basically folded his tent to look into other approaches to computer based entertainment than large team game development, Seropian and Wideload have moved to establish an extremely lean core team that utilizes a licensed engine (Halo) and independent contractors for non-design assets.

Wideload has a core team of about 11, working out of an office in Chicago.  During the 17-month course of development for Stubbs, they used about 65 outside contractors, mostly for art, animation, and sound assets, many external to the Chicago area.  There were substantial benefits to this approach.  Firstly, there was a lot less trauma in changing team size and dealing with unsatisfactory results with contractors, since ‘contractors are easy to hire and fire’.  This seemed to come as a guilty pleasure to Seropian, but it also was vital to Wideload’s success.  Not only did the small core size keep the burn rate down, particularly when the game ran late (estimated savings of one million dollars over four months of overage), but the core team clearly had higher morale, had a freer, more integrated, and more agile creative process; the game could expand to accommodate new ideas, since the core could design them and then just buy the additional assets needed to include the new ideas; and the small core size had business advantages that fed back into the creative process.

The initial advantage to a small core team is that you can avoid much of the overhead (no HR department, for example) that a larger team would need.  It also gave Wideload considerable leverage in accepting a publishing arrangement, which in turn meant that Wideload could insist on ownership of it’s IP, and can work without the stress of being totally dependant on making milestones to fund core operations.  Moreover, this reduced burn meant that Wideload could walk away from undesirable deals and hold out for the publishing arrangement it wanted.*  Finally, it meant that, at the end of the project, when Wideload needed to start a new project, instead of a 40-70 headcount team, they had a 10-12 person team to start preproduction on the next game.  Given that, based on casual conversations around me during the meeting, about half the people sitting around me had either been upsized or downsized in the last few months, it is obvious how desirable team stability is in a job in this industry.

Seropian spent considerable time discussing the downsides to the use of contractors, but I’ll focus on the core points that stood out to me.  First off, there were more training issues than expected.  There was often a period of a few days where a new contractor had to be brought up to speed on the engine, this when a contractor might only do two weeks of actual work on the project.  Further, Seropian found that generally low bidders were to be avoided, because they were probably underestimating the workload.  Complete design, with reference assets and sample assets for bidders to create with their bid are essential.

Most important was a tight feedback loop with contractors, to maximize iterations of asset refinement and keep communications flowing.  This aspect was vital for both maximizing quality and maintaining schedule integrity.  The latter point was even more important than on normal game development because, Wideload discovered that, while all crunch time is undesirable, when the core team must crunch, they crunch alone, because contractors do not crunch for you. 

This leads to the most important aspect of heavy reliance on contractors that Seropian and Wideload discovered.  They had expected that the core team would create a significant quantity of assets for the game.  This turned out not to be the case, since the core team was pretty much entirely consumed with managing and integrating the contractor products into the game.

On balance, Seropian seemed very happy with their experiment in using contractors.  The game was late, but it shipped, and Seropian seemed happy with the quality and artistic integrity of the game.  Most of all, I got the sense that the process had not had the sort of soul-killing stress that I heard in the earlier talks of Dennis Thorley and Lorne Lanning.  In fact, for Seropian, the process sounded like it might have actually been fun.


* Obligatory EA story:  One of Wideload’s founding principles is to produce original games, rather than licensed or traditional genre offerings.  In marketing the game early on, Wideload sent a proposal to EA, explaining the game as ‘an original take on a zombie game where the player is the zombie’.  EA came back after a couple of weeks with the response that marketing really liked the game, but they thought that a great twist would be to make it so that, instead of being a zombie, the player would kill zombies.

[Soln]

Nice write-up.  Thanks for this.

I agree.  Agile Software demands a smaller team, usually more experienced, but also more dedicated and familiar with one another.  I've used some contractors -- and the ramp-up time is >6 weeks and is painful (expectation mgmt is key, i.e. no guarantee of long-term employment) --  but I will never ever EVAR use a contracting outsourcer (e.g. InfoSys, Sypherion).  I'm sorry, but offshoring for software is garbage.  Those companies  crotchpheasants are all about tackling sw from a CMMI/6-Sigma approach, and that is badly unrealistic for a shop building consumer sw where the product lifecycle is <12 months.

The hardest part of gaming dev (and I'm not in gaming sw) seems to be asset mgmt (? true?)  Handling graphic, text and audio content, editing it and massaging it for publication I imagine takes a serious cost in time and $.  For my short-time as a PjM in a large web shop I know the terrible amount of iterative time it can take for content.  If there's any argument against outsourcers doing asset design I'd say it would be in the turn-around and maybe cost, since your partners will usually ding you for any spare pixel you want changed.  Otherwise, this approach of small teams having good external partnerships is what I also believe: Get a group of good people to solve the tough network and engine problems, and get experts in content do the shineh.

[Edit] My EA story: when I was interviewing at EA they talked a bit about their contracting techniques and needs.  Seems in QA alone during the ramp-up to certification for a title they max out the Vancouver studio to 1500 testers. A lot of these are button-mashers, but regardless their regular staff was only 250.  That's a whole big buttload o' temps.

[Hoax]

Nothing at all to add, just wanted to encourage this type of post I found it to be quite interesting.

[Evangolis]

On asset management, the file count for Stubbs was over 15,000, so that is a big issue.  All design proper is core team stuff; while there was no detail discussion of the nuts and bolts of contractor tasks, it was pretty clear that it the work was very closely specced.  With a licensed data-driven engine, little 'real' software is being written; the bulk of the work is art, animation, motion capture, and sound asset production.  While not specifically an agile shop, it seemed to me that the core team, particularly as far as design methodology, partook heavily of the ideas underlying agile software development.  One of the things Seropian was most obviously happy about was how the core team's creativity was enhanced by the process, as well as the elimination of pretty much all 'design politics' from the process.

On offshoring, I would note Dave Rickey's prior comments about how cheap Russian art assets could be, but I also would note Seropian's repeated cautions about lowest bidder outcome.  The need for strong and rapid communications (Seropian noted that IM and design forums were useful tools in this) is crucial to the process.  One of the things about costs Seropian mentioned was that he liked the compartmentalization of costs with contractors.  Each asset was essentially self contained, cost-wise, rather than more generic and ongoing compared to more typical internal team methods.

On EA, it is interesting to note that the 80-odd attendees last night 'was most of the game design community in Chicago', as said by one IDGA organizer (admittedly that is probably an overstatement, particularly since there were certainly outsiders like myself there).  EA has just opened up a new office here, and has 50 new hires, with another 20 left to go, so the behemoth lumbers on.

Since I'm about to move downstate, it will be harder to make these meetings in the future, but I'll try, and I'd be happy to relate anything of particular interest from them.  Note that J writes up lectures from AGD and other Austin area resources on his site from time to time.  I'm not aware of anything similar in the Seattle or California areas.

[Pococurante]

So the IDGA chapter in Chicago...

Not to pick nits but this is the IGDA, not IDGA.  I correct only because I was so intrigued there might be a Dallas chapter I went to the IDGA website - ugh please gawd no...

[Evangolis]

Thanks for the correction, I'm forever tangling the letters of IGDA, along with a couple of other organizations.

I love the spellchecker function, but it would be nice if the vocabulary could be enhanced to include terms used here that aren't common elsewhere.

[Alkiera]

So the IDGA chapter in Chicago...

Not to pick nits but this is the IGDA, not IDGA.  I correct only because I was so intrigued there might be a Dallas chapter I went to the IDGA website - ugh please gawd no...

Was that the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, or the Indiana Dairy and Goat Association?

I'm not sure which is more scary.  I'm conservative almost to the point of libertarian, I'm all for the Defense Dept... but phrases like 'Government Advancement' are... unsettling.   

Alkiera

[HaemishM]

Psychochild did a similar thing with Meridian 59. The programming was written, he and his partner did the rewrites and hired contractors to do artwork. It's a good setup, but yeah, I'd caution against offshoring as well. There's too much of it going on anyway, and the difficulties in language barriers can be a HUGE problem.

All good, stable games have one thing in common, good project management. It is the most needed and least found personal skill in the games industry, IMO.

[Shockeye]

I love the spellchecker function, but it would be nice if the vocabulary could be enhanced to include terms used here that aren't common elsewhere.

I will be changing things so I can update the master dictionary easily and people can create their own personal dictionaries.

[Evangolis]

I love the spellchecker function, but it would be nice if the vocabulary could be enhanced to include terms used here that aren't common elsewhere.

I will be changing things so I can update the master dictionary easily and people can create their own personal dictionaries.

This would fucking rock.

[schild]

Yes, it will.