12 ms·

John Romero on his book “Doom Guy” and developing games at a small scale

215 points by riidom 3y ago

reactordev 3y ago
I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. My biggest gripe is that these smaller, “starter” games usually don’t get much play. Everyone wants to immerse in a loading screen space sim but can’t stand well-painted pixel sprites? Crazy. There’s still hope. Hit games are hits not because of just their art but because of their play. Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. What it did have is an awesome 2.5D world. Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. However, the level design, textures, and concepts, and play are still fantastic. My only advice is if you want to make games, start making games. Who cares what your avatar looks like. Make it fun. @ works just fine. Also, Commander Keen art splashes were top notch. The only thing missing was pro dithering.
- hoseja 3y ago
  Pixel sprites are their own predictable mindless thing nowadays. Check out Splattercat who does first impressions of indie games. Once in a while there is an ascendant experience but most of it is samey generic RPGs, often with lazy sprites.
- brezelgoring 3y ago
  >Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come? I remember reading about that a while ago and it wasn't until the last 5 or so years that indies got back into magazine covers and such.
  - tiptup300 3y ago
    Hard disagree, the only people who know of him probably respect indie game developers.
  - giobox 3y ago
    > Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come? I can't agree with this assessment at all - the idea Phil Fish, "insufferable" or otherwise, somehow caused a lot of damage to "the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come" seems a bit absurd to me.
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    Phil Fish was personally an absolute manchild who had one single good mechanical idea and rode it until the wheels fell off Indie developers though by their very nature are an extremely varied bunch, and the things they make are a reflection of that
    - astrange 3y ago
      His game was clearly inspired by an extremely good Japanese indie game (Cave Story), which makes his quote about all Japanese games being bad a strange thing to say. Funny enough the Wikipedia page for Fez hasn't noticed the inspiration either.
      - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        I don't have a dog in this fight but I found Cave Story to be completely unfun.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Artist is weird (and probably a real jerk). News at 11. It seems an enormous leap that one goofball did anything to damage the "credibility" of developers. How many people could name even a single indie designer?
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    Not at all. I think Indie Game The Movie took a lot of liberties to show him a certain way. I think the stress of it all got to him and now he does other things. I’m more aquatinted with the programmer Renaud from back in the days. I think the media loves a juicy meltdown story and tried to make him a scapegoat for the indie game industry going mainstream. Indie games not on magazines says more about the indie games at the time, nothing more. How many times you going to feature Jonathan Blow? Was Phil Fish insufferable? I don’t know, never met him. Did he say some things that were not in alignment with my worldview? Yeah, sure. I do think Fez, the game, the wonderful spectacularly clever game, was the indie equivalent of a Mario brothers hit. The void I think you speak of was when XNA died, MonoGame wasn’t quite there yet, people jumped to Unity and it took them awhile to get up to speed in it. Others like me went off and wrote their own engines and stuff, others joined the ranks of the studios. I think Phil made the best game he could. That’s all that matters. Everything else is superfluous.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  If you haven't played it yet, you would probably love Prodeus. It's basically a modernization of the Doom/Quake formula, but with satisfying pseudo-retro graphics and really thoughtful level design. It's also made by two people (I think three technically, but the site lists two) who have worked on AAA titles like Doom 2016, the new Wolfenstein, and Bioshock: Infinite Prodeus also has a shotgun that can snipe enemies at far distances with a long range incendiary mode https://www.prodeusgame.com/ https://www.prodeusgame.com/
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    I kinda wish the "retro graphics" could be turned off at least in 3D games. I don't really get the appeal to start with. DOOM wasn't retro, it had amazing graphics and required good hardware to run acceptably. Monkey Island wasn't "pixel art", it was state of the art on the hardware of the time. Many games of the era had high resolution modes, and got them as soon as it was remotely practical. Duke Nukem 3D could be played at 800x600.
    - Minor49er 3y ago
      In the case of Prodeus, the devs aimed to solve the problem of sprites, but in a true 3D space. With a lot of Doom ports, when mouselook was enabled, it showed just how flat everything actually was since looking up and down in true 3D would make them look like cardboard. But with Prodeus, everything is 3D but models render as if they were sprites at fixed angles. I really like this aesthetic and haven't seen any other games do something quite like it. I stopped consciously noticing it partway through the campaign
      - BXlnt2EachOther 3y ago
        Prodeus also seems to have an option to use those 3D models rather than the derived/simulated sprites. Saw it in an article a while back and thought it sounded cool... might have even stumbled on the article here at hckrnews? A/B video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-hPYOIwMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-hPYOIwMw (warning, digital blood) Looks like it is on XBox/PC Gamepass for those who have an active subscription, but it is cycling out at the end of the month.
- esrauch 3y ago
  The weird thing is that I actually don't care even a little bit about graphics and really want a scaled down experience (partially as a parent it's not possible to spend hundreds of hours on a game anymore... or even 20). But it's somehow bizarrely hard to find in Indie, they all want to be these sprawling finicky massive things where you have to read a novel length wiki to find out that "four sticks can make a log", or are brutally difficult, or both (Darkest Dungeon comes to mind). There's some counter examples but theyre weirdly hard to find.
  - Baeocystin 3y ago
    I recently came across Shadow Complex, which is a 2.5D Metroidvania type experience. It was fun, scratched the right gaming itch, and was the right size, if that makes sense. It didn't try to be anything it wasn't, but it did what it was well. Worth checking out if you haven't tried it yet.
    - adamrezich 3y ago
      Shadow Complex is a classic at this point—I played through it at release while sick in bed with H1N1 in 2009. it's like the perfect medium-sized game—it goes above and beyond to do cool stuff, without ever overstaying its welcome in any regard. just enough neat cool things you haven't seen before—like pushing the right stick up contextually aiming your gun into the Z-plane to shoot guys in the background. I wish people set out to make more medium-sized games like that, though I'm sure the budget was much higher than we think it is.
      - Baeocystin 3y ago
        I hadn't realized it came out so long ago! It's gameplay is evergreen. Thinking of medium sized games, I think the original Orcs Must Die! would qualify as well. It was a tight, solid experience. There aren't too many 3d tower defense type games that I'd put on a must-play list, but OMD is at the top.
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    You should play a short hike, especially if you have a steam deck. Other great or lovely short games : Firewatch Steamworld dig 2 isn't as short but you can play it in 10 min chunks and it's cheerful and fun Backbone (now called tails noir I think) is weird but worthwhile. It starts as cheerful beautiful detective mystery and ends as dark beautiful existential story. Hades is also great for 10 minute bursts. Amanita design games - botanicula machinarium samorost
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  What do you mean "mediocre". Pixel art (like so many graphic adventure games) might not be your thing but different styles for different folks. I know you were trying to say "it didn't offer graphic card pushing 3d like AAA games but it did X uniquely" but by no means can you call that mediocre, specially if you've ever seen old games. Gameplay over one specific style of graphics, is probably the concept you're looking for.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    I mean mediocre. There was nothing special about it. It wasn’t even that good. There have been much better looking pixel art games made. The style of Fez came from Phil redoing the art 3 times, outsourcing the character design, and still managed to release it. And never seen old games? I grew up on Atari. I’ve been playing games since. Even made a few. Fez was amazing but not for its art. It was flat. I still enjoyed it. I think gamers shouldn’t get so hung up on pushing their systems to the limits and instead should focus on pushing their play to the limit.
    - isaacremuant 3y ago
      If that's the basis, "nothing special" about it can be said about any game that is not GTA. There's much better games out there is, again, unspecific and bad criticism. There's also a lot of focus on the individual developer (and his personality). I don't care how it's made, criticize it on it's own terms. I've played many old games. You don't make a coherent or specific point. I agree with you that gameplay beats everything (I said it in my original comment) and there's no one size fits all, but that's why it's so absurd for you to attack art of a game as mediocre with absolutely no basis. Basically you're trying to use it as a binary opposite of "outstanding". Maybe pick the words you use carefully or have an actual argument to back then up.
- Aleksdev 3y ago
  I feel like the mistakes new dev makes leads to fun little bugs or Easter eggs in some games. I remember once playing an indie game (can’t remember the name) but I was able to jump out of bounds of the level. I had more fun doing that then actually playing the levels correctly. Since the whole point of games is to have fun I don’t mind bugs.
- mjr00 3y ago
  > Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse. I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.
  - corysama 3y ago
    If you are looking for an upgrade to make playing Doom today look like it did in your memory, there's https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project Review by Digital Foundry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-aVt77epQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-aVt77epQ4
    - usefulcat 3y ago
      That actually looks great. Slightly more detail but still bearing a very strong resemblance to the original.
    - tacocataco 3y ago
      https://freedoom.github.io/ https://freedoom.github.io/ has tons of free doom mods if you want to check out what the modding community has been up to all these decades.
  - taneq 3y ago
    We've come full circle on low-rez graphics, at the time it was the best definition they could generate but now it's an aesthetic. The original Doom graphics work surprisingly well in VR, too. Fire up GZDoom with the VR mod (some fiddling required to make it work in Windows MR) and it works in a way I wouldn't have believed without seeing it.
    - troupo 3y ago
- taneq 3y ago
  > it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. I've been referring to this as "baked-bean-ification". Something originally quite distinctively spicy and varied gets progressively fine tuned for the mass market, resulting in a universally inoffensive and yet immeasurably bland experience.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Into the Breach (turn based) can be played in ten minute campaign bouts if you have the self discipline. Katana Zero is about ten hours of gameplay total in side scrolling fighting game sort of like Double Dragon.
  - psd1 3y ago
    I'm still looking for something to satisfy that Into The Breach itch.
    - stevenwoo 3y ago
      Based only on the trailer, there's an upcoming Switch game, Unicorn Overlord, that looks like a reincarnation of Heroes of Might and Magic. Slightly more than Into The Breach.
      - psd1 3y ago
        It's for several console platforms but not, alas, PC. I'm also not a massive fan of busy saturated graphics. Good tip, though. I'm currently playing Invisible, Inc and loving it. It's more akin to XCom 2 in pace and scale than Into The Breach, though.
- acomjean 3y ago
  I played doom recently on Linux. I have almost all the original wads from Doom box set. One thing that struck me is how fast you can move in that game. But the not being able to look up can make it a little wierd. I like simplier story games sometimes. The uncharted series I thought was fun, you get 2 weapons and maybe some grenades. Lots of cut scenes. Compared to some of the inventory and level up trees I have seen it was refreshing. Watching my partner play fallout 4 I was amazed at the inventory management required. On iOS when I need a quick game, I’ll play plasma sky which is a modern galaxan style shooter.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >But the not being able to look up can make it a little wierd. Install GZDoom over it. You're welcome. https://zdoom.org/downloads https://zdoom.org/downloads
  - keyle 3y ago
    yeah that's why many modern FPS are considered walking simulators. Back in the day, e.g. quake 3 arena, flying, jumping, always running was exhilarating. Nowadays... cut scene, NPC hand holding, fake action to tutor... I get it, they lose less people from research groups, at the cost of the real gamers that know the basics. Also the art team literally spent a month on a room that you can just jump through? What a waste, no, the player has to be stuck here for a solid minute, walking slowly, bobbing the camera side to side etc. I'm convinced that to have games that people fly through quickly, you need either procedurally generated content or PS1 and older type graphics. With realistic graphics, it's impossible, unless it's a closed-room situation.
- syspec 3y ago
  Try Aoe2 I never played it until last year, and now it’s my favorite game of all time
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    From little known indie studio Microsoft.
    - syspec 3y ago
      Created by an actual little known studio, Forgotten Empires, and /published/ by Microsoft
- raytopia 3y ago
  I wish itch.io was more popular there are so many interesting games on there but like you said not enough people playing.
- arvinsim 3y ago
  As a long time gamer, it looks like I prefer small indie games for skill/exploration based play and AAA games for linear, narrative rich experience.
- barrkel 3y ago
  Doom gameplay has aged quite well. The sprites have a bit of "cardboard cutout" quality to them in higher resolutions, but the gameplay is still really good.
- Kiro 3y ago
  Surely you must have a better example than Fez. I think it's beautiful. I love that kind of clean pixel art.
  - hbn 3y ago
    If anything I'd say Fez's real achievement is the art. Once the novelty of the 2D/3D hybrid gimmick has dried up (which happens pretty fast), the gameplay is pretty mediocre. If you watched Indie Game: The Movie, it seemed like pretty much the entirety of Phil Fish's effort went into obsessing over the art. And I have to give him credit that it looks pretty damn good.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    Dead Cells, HLD, both have much better art styles than Fez. Fez’s worlds were great but the choice of 16px vs 32px limited it in details, hence geometry carving of the 3D world to add more detail impossible to achieve with pixel art tiled textures without overdraw. I’m not saying I disliked Fez, but to compare the art of Fez to Chronotrigger is like holding a child’s finger painting to a Van Gogh. From a distance they may look the same…
    - Kiro 3y ago
      That's just your opinion. There is no objective "better" here.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. Huh? I find it has aged just fine, aesthetics wise. Or do you mean the lower res of the original?
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  > I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. I so strongly agree with this. There's a certain sense of "exploration of the game" that's missing in AAA games. AAA games are just entirely too smooth as experiences, there's no jank, very little learning, etc. I don't necessarily mean exploration as in, exploring every bit of content/land, but learning the game itself. When Pillars of Eternity came out, so many people didn't like it because they were surprised by the idea of having to actually learn the underlying system. I was hopeful for VR for a while because I figured if the developers themselves haven't "solved the problem", there would be a return to that type of exploration where a game would often have amazing parts and then parts that didn't work as well.
gumballindie 3y ago
> Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects. This worked well for romero and carmack. A game a month was it? That's how you refine your skills.
- rpdillon 3y ago
  Indeed...Doom was Romero's 90th game! https://gamerant.com/john-romero-doom-90th-game-made/ https://gamerant.com/john-romero-doom-90th-game-made/
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    Seems... deeply misleading to draw an equivalence to today. The market is vastly more competitive.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      But back then it was much smaller. Suppose some will always find an excuse as to why things may fail today vs yesterday, while others will find a way regardless.
      - spywaregorilla 3y ago
        That is not nearly the same thing as saying the strategies of yesterday are applicable to today
        gumballindie 3y ago
        The strategy of refining your skills through extensive practice is as old as success itself.
        spywaregorilla 3y ago
        And yet adapting and innovating is the, slightly younger, vastly more successful brother.
LarsDu88 3y ago
"13 games that we made in 1991 alone" Wow. And these games weren't just shovelware. I grew up playing Commander Keen games, and to this day have not finished a single one.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  I remember playing it as a kid and I couldn’t even beat a single level
dcchuck 3y ago
Looking forward to reading this, thanks for putting it on my radar. I really enjoyed Masters of Doom - which has been discussed here plenty on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=masters+of+doom https://hn.algolia.com/?q=masters+of+doom
- orliesaurus 3y ago
  I personally felt Masters of Doom being better than this one, this had too much "life" drama in it IMHO
orliesaurus 3y ago
Kinda a diff topic but if anyone else read "Doom Guy" - what did you think of it? I know it's not what this interview (blog) is about but I feel like compared to Masters of Doom this one had a little too much "narrative" and "drama" and felt like it was an answer to certain things discussed in Masters of Doom which he wanted to set the record straight. Another weirdness - i.e. early into the book John Romero says that he has a super-power like ability to remember everything perfectly...which to me sounds like some big ego bullcrap? Because there are a lot of things that he conveniently did not discuss in the book but which fans know happened! So what kind of super-power
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  I just finished Doom Guy a few days ago and really enjoyed it. The start of the book is definitely not what I (or probably anybody else) expected but it was a hell of a story. I also appreciated his honest conclusion near the end where he comes to the conclusion for his post-Id failures. I did think he should have gone into more of a deep dive into why Daikatana was a bad game. Yeah, turnover. Yeah, delays from chasing the new shiny engine. But for a company he started where "Design Is Law", why did his game suck when Deus Ex being developed at the same time at the same company turn out so great? And how was id able to pump out Quake II and Quake III in the time he was buggering on Daikatana? Somewhere in the book (start or end, can't remember) there is a quote from Carmack that references Romero's amazing recall ability, so I'll give hime the benefit of the doubt here.
  - nfRfqX5n 3y ago
    I'm not quite finished with it but I thought Masters of Doom had more drama. This one had more personal/childhood stuff, which I wasn't personally interested in. Romero's narration of the audiobook was a bit quirky though
  - bombcar 3y ago
    One thing I've learned from reading the Factorio blogs is that you can easily get caught up in details and forget to make the game fun.
  - 3y ago
bitwize 3y ago
I was just thinking about Romero. I was watching the "Wha Happun?" episode about the System Shock remake, and I realized... back in the day we made fun of Romero for his mismanagement of the Daikatana kerfuffle: schedule slip after schedule slip, changing engines twice, the staff quitting and needing to almost be completely replaced, it's no wonder the game turned out crap. But so many of today's games have most or all of these problems. System Shock (2023) changed engines, had massive staff churn, and considerable schedule slips (taking seven years to Daikatana's four), especially when COVID-19 hit. But by paring back the ambition and focusing on delivering an experience faithful to the original, they got it out the door despite doubts from the fan base and it was a hit. So today, some games do turn out good despite mouldering in development hell for the better part of a decade. Of course you still get your fair share of buggy messes (which may be rehabilitated with a post-release patch) and complete misses like Mighty No. 9. So it seems like maybe we've hit a complexity threshold beyond which it stretches human feasibility to turn out a good to great AAA game within a reasonable time frame. And maybe Romero was just one of the first people to "go big" with Daikatana, and he hit that threshold before everyone else. His ambition (and ego) exceeded his actual reach, but... few if any had attempted such a large scale project before, aspiring to reinvent the FPS and add RPG and story elements to it. Granted, Half-Life made everybody else look like chumps when it came to embedding story into an FPS -- but Daikatana was announced long before Half-Life congealed. The man deserves full credit for learning from his most famous boondoggle, and focusing on smaller games rather than epic genre-busters that he doesn't quite have the ability to manage the development of.
- logicchains 3y ago
  The Daikatana marketing really had a lasting impact; even now when I see the name John Romero my brain autocompletes "is gonna make you his bitch!".
- whatever_dude 3y ago
  I used to make fun/hate the guy, but nowadays I can tell her really cares about games, he just bit more then he could chew and was too inexperienced to properly deal with it. The bit about being non-confrontational (and this being a hindrance during the Ion Storm days) also hits home. I would have spiraled out of control myself in that position I'm sure.
skadamat 3y ago
These ideas hit home for me and heavily overlap with the ideas in How Big Things Get Done: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512
GreenJon 3y ago
It’s a fantastic read, and with his sense of recall being so strong it provides a lot of detail you other might not get. He does say in the end he might have made it a bit more positive than some of the moments may have actually been, but I’ve not seen any of the other people from those times contradict what he’s said. I also found that Shareware Heroes by Richard Moss was a good, if more general, accompaniment.
- WoodenChair 3y ago
  Yes, although it's worth noting it's only a few chapters of Shareware Heroes. For those curious about Shareware Heroes, I interviewed Richard Moss (the author) about shareware a couple months ago on my podcast: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/67e565b5/shareware-with-richard-moss https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/67e565b5/shareware-...
sillysaurusx 3y ago
If you’re into nostalgia, John is live talking about open source / quake, but mostly AI: https://www.youtube.com/live/aM7F5kuMjRA?si=jBbM-n7m9h1_DmvN https://www.youtube.com/live/aM7F5kuMjRA?si=jBbM-n7m9h1_DmvN
- justin66 3y ago
  Different John. In some ways more noteworthy - Carmack speaks in public less often than Romero.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Whoops, I meant Carmack. It’s a habit calling him John. Sorry for the confusion.
mdswanson 3y ago
If you're here because you're a FPS fan, you should check out the new FPS Documentary: https://fpsdoc.com/pages/limited-run https://fpsdoc.com/pages/limited-run
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  That was a great watch.
hresvelgr 3y ago
The biggest thing that kills indie developers is taking a waterfall approach to game design. "I want to make an XYZ genre game with mechanic ABC and a story about 123." There is absolutely no way to know if that combination of designs will be fun at all, and it won't be until they're too far in development before they realise it's irredeemable. Best advice I ever got on this subject: identify what you want the most impactful element of the game to be. Is it a unique combat mechanic? Is it a compelling story? Make that first and only that. If it's impactful, take it further and build more around it. Show it to people as early and regularly as possible. If people tell you it's boring, they're probably right, but don't listen to them if they tell you how to fix it. If you can't fix it, toss it and move on. You cannot afford to find out if your game is fun 2 years into development. Also, most of your ideas are probably terrible and you won't start having better ideas until you make and finish a number of projects.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aikinai 3y ago
  This is the secret to Nintendo’s success. Despite being a very traditional Japanese company, iterative, agile development is in their DNA. They experiment with a lot of different game mechanics that might be fun, test them early on other people in the office, and then when they find a core mechanic that seems like a game can be built around it, they start fleshing that out, add other mechanics that work as sweeteners, and build up iteratively. Only when they have a good picture of the game do they start piecing together some sort of story or setting that makes the mechanic make sense. Even the IP might be swapped entirely to something that better jives with the mechanic, or just to stick on a brand that will help it sell. That’s why their games stay fresh and fun and they can maintain their innovative edge.
  - kqr 3y ago
    > Despite being a very traditional Japanese company Huh, isn't the idea of agile development to lift lean from manufacturing to development? And lean is very Japanese, at least in some sense!
shultays 3y ago
People that had success decades ago seems to be forgetting that it was decades ago. Doom was released 30 years ago. In a much, much smaller market and in a lot less competition. He is saying people are not making smaller games before moving to bigger projects but people, collectively, are doing that. For every "13 games that we made in 1991 alone" back then, now there are probably 130 games that gets released everyday. Not one of them will probably make any real money let alone be popular. It is a bigger market. Sure you are increasing your chances if you release more, if you get better but still it is mostly about luck at this point for indie devs. Even with the name John Romero and some big publishers behind he is not able to replicate his success today
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kanwisher 3y ago
  Check out https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ there is whole communities of people that are constantly making small games. Better to get your feet wet then to jump into a giant game
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lproven 3y ago
This is a very poorly written article. Some examples of the multiple things leap out at me as bad style: > John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale The title is styled in block caps. So in fact it says JOHN ROMERO ON HIS BOOK DOOM GUY What is a "book doom guy" and how can Romero own one? Sloppy. > Posted On September 25, 2023 By zukalous And yet, "CZ" is used as the interviewer shorthand. So how are we supposed to know who C.Z. is? That's both sloppy and deceitful, as the author is trying to hide behind a poor pseudonym. Grow up. > I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” Quotation marks are not emphasis. This is a #fail. > it occurred to me that at the start, he and the founders Comma splice. Very poor English. > My meeting John Romero at GDC 2022 "My meeting $PERSON"? That's both bad style and broken grammar. "My meeting with $P" would be better. "I met $P" would be better still. "The author and $P" would be better than that. Almost anything would be better, in fact. Eugh. > CZ: How did you scope it? "Scope" is not a verb. Arguably, "scope out" is a phrasal verb, but the author -- I use the word very loosely -- doesn't say "scope out". > The scoping on our very first game Yeah, it's not a gerund, either. Oh, there are so many it's just painful to read, and I have better things to do than sub-edit this. > What Software company offices looked like in the late 80s. Random capitals. Missing apostrophe. This is just such a mess, with random passive voice and all sorts of bad writing, and not so much bad editing as no editing. I gave up. For me, this is unreadable. Shame: Romero is an interesting man and this was an interesting time in the industry.

215 points by riidom 3y ago

I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. My biggest gripe is that these smaller, “starter” games usually don’t get much play. Everyone wants to immerse in a loading screen space sim but can’t stand well-painted pixel sprites? Crazy. There’s still hope. Hit games are hits not because of just their art but because of their play. Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. What it did have is an awesome 2.5D world. Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. However, the level design, textures, and concepts, and play are still fantastic. My only advice is if you want to make games, start making games. Who cares what your avatar looks like. Make it fun. @ works just fine. Also, Commander Keen art splashes were top notch. The only thing missing was pro dithering.

hoseja 3y ago
Pixel sprites are their own predictable mindless thing nowadays. Check out Splattercat who does first impressions of indie games. Once in a while there is an ascendant experience but most of it is samey generic RPGs, often with lazy sprites.
brezelgoring 3y ago
>Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come? I remember reading about that a while ago and it wasn't until the last 5 or so years that indies got back into magazine covers and such.
- tiptup300 3y ago
  Hard disagree, the only people who know of him probably respect indie game developers.
- giobox 3y ago
  > Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come? I can't agree with this assessment at all - the idea Phil Fish, "insufferable" or otherwise, somehow caused a lot of damage to "the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come" seems a bit absurd to me.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Phil Fish was personally an absolute manchild who had one single good mechanical idea and rode it until the wheels fell off Indie developers though by their very nature are an extremely varied bunch, and the things they make are a reflection of that
  - astrange 3y ago
    His game was clearly inspired by an extremely good Japanese indie game (Cave Story), which makes his quote about all Japanese games being bad a strange thing to say. Funny enough the Wikipedia page for Fez hasn't noticed the inspiration either.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      I don't have a dog in this fight but I found Cave Story to be completely unfun.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Artist is weird (and probably a real jerk). News at 11. It seems an enormous leap that one goofball did anything to damage the "credibility" of developers. How many people could name even a single indie designer?
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Not at all. I think Indie Game The Movie took a lot of liberties to show him a certain way. I think the stress of it all got to him and now he does other things. I’m more aquatinted with the programmer Renaud from back in the days. I think the media loves a juicy meltdown story and tried to make him a scapegoat for the indie game industry going mainstream. Indie games not on magazines says more about the indie games at the time, nothing more. How many times you going to feature Jonathan Blow? Was Phil Fish insufferable? I don’t know, never met him. Did he say some things that were not in alignment with my worldview? Yeah, sure. I do think Fez, the game, the wonderful spectacularly clever game, was the indie equivalent of a Mario brothers hit. The void I think you speak of was when XNA died, MonoGame wasn’t quite there yet, people jumped to Unity and it took them awhile to get up to speed in it. Others like me went off and wrote their own engines and stuff, others joined the ranks of the studios. I think Phil made the best game he could. That’s all that matters. Everything else is superfluous.
Minor49er 3y ago
If you haven't played it yet, you would probably love Prodeus. It's basically a modernization of the Doom/Quake formula, but with satisfying pseudo-retro graphics and really thoughtful level design. It's also made by two people (I think three technically, but the site lists two) who have worked on AAA titles like Doom 2016, the new Wolfenstein, and Bioshock: Infinite Prodeus also has a shotgun that can snipe enemies at far distances with a long range incendiary mode https://www.prodeusgame.com/ https://www.prodeusgame.com/
- dale_glass 3y ago
  I kinda wish the "retro graphics" could be turned off at least in 3D games. I don't really get the appeal to start with. DOOM wasn't retro, it had amazing graphics and required good hardware to run acceptably. Monkey Island wasn't "pixel art", it was state of the art on the hardware of the time. Many games of the era had high resolution modes, and got them as soon as it was remotely practical. Duke Nukem 3D could be played at 800x600.
  - Minor49er 3y ago
    In the case of Prodeus, the devs aimed to solve the problem of sprites, but in a true 3D space. With a lot of Doom ports, when mouselook was enabled, it showed just how flat everything actually was since looking up and down in true 3D would make them look like cardboard. But with Prodeus, everything is 3D but models render as if they were sprites at fixed angles. I really like this aesthetic and haven't seen any other games do something quite like it. I stopped consciously noticing it partway through the campaign
    - BXlnt2EachOther 3y ago
      Prodeus also seems to have an option to use those 3D models rather than the derived/simulated sprites. Saw it in an article a while back and thought it sounded cool... might have even stumbled on the article here at hckrnews? A/B video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-hPYOIwMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-hPYOIwMw (warning, digital blood) Looks like it is on XBox/PC Gamepass for those who have an active subscription, but it is cycling out at the end of the month.
esrauch 3y ago
The weird thing is that I actually don't care even a little bit about graphics and really want a scaled down experience (partially as a parent it's not possible to spend hundreds of hours on a game anymore... or even 20). But it's somehow bizarrely hard to find in Indie, they all want to be these sprawling finicky massive things where you have to read a novel length wiki to find out that "four sticks can make a log", or are brutally difficult, or both (Darkest Dungeon comes to mind). There's some counter examples but theyre weirdly hard to find.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  I recently came across Shadow Complex, which is a 2.5D Metroidvania type experience. It was fun, scratched the right gaming itch, and was the right size, if that makes sense. It didn't try to be anything it wasn't, but it did what it was well. Worth checking out if you haven't tried it yet.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    Shadow Complex is a classic at this point—I played through it at release while sick in bed with H1N1 in 2009. it's like the perfect medium-sized game—it goes above and beyond to do cool stuff, without ever overstaying its welcome in any regard. just enough neat cool things you haven't seen before—like pushing the right stick up contextually aiming your gun into the Z-plane to shoot guys in the background. I wish people set out to make more medium-sized games like that, though I'm sure the budget was much higher than we think it is.
    - Baeocystin 3y ago
      I hadn't realized it came out so long ago! It's gameplay is evergreen. Thinking of medium sized games, I think the original Orcs Must Die! would qualify as well. It was a tight, solid experience. There aren't too many 3d tower defense type games that I'd put on a must-play list, but OMD is at the top.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  You should play a short hike, especially if you have a steam deck. Other great or lovely short games : Firewatch Steamworld dig 2 isn't as short but you can play it in 10 min chunks and it's cheerful and fun Backbone (now called tails noir I think) is weird but worthwhile. It starts as cheerful beautiful detective mystery and ends as dark beautiful existential story. Hades is also great for 10 minute bursts. Amanita design games - botanicula machinarium samorost
isaacremuant 3y ago
What do you mean "mediocre". Pixel art (like so many graphic adventure games) might not be your thing but different styles for different folks. I know you were trying to say "it didn't offer graphic card pushing 3d like AAA games but it did X uniquely" but by no means can you call that mediocre, specially if you've ever seen old games. Gameplay over one specific style of graphics, is probably the concept you're looking for.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  I mean mediocre. There was nothing special about it. It wasn’t even that good. There have been much better looking pixel art games made. The style of Fez came from Phil redoing the art 3 times, outsourcing the character design, and still managed to release it. And never seen old games? I grew up on Atari. I’ve been playing games since. Even made a few. Fez was amazing but not for its art. It was flat. I still enjoyed it. I think gamers shouldn’t get so hung up on pushing their systems to the limits and instead should focus on pushing their play to the limit.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    If that's the basis, "nothing special" about it can be said about any game that is not GTA. There's much better games out there is, again, unspecific and bad criticism. There's also a lot of focus on the individual developer (and his personality). I don't care how it's made, criticize it on it's own terms. I've played many old games. You don't make a coherent or specific point. I agree with you that gameplay beats everything (I said it in my original comment) and there's no one size fits all, but that's why it's so absurd for you to attack art of a game as mediocre with absolutely no basis. Basically you're trying to use it as a binary opposite of "outstanding". Maybe pick the words you use carefully or have an actual argument to back then up.
Aleksdev 3y ago
I feel like the mistakes new dev makes leads to fun little bugs or Easter eggs in some games. I remember once playing an indie game (can’t remember the name) but I was able to jump out of bounds of the level. I had more fun doing that then actually playing the levels correctly. Since the whole point of games is to have fun I don’t mind bugs.
mjr00 3y ago
> Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse. I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.
- corysama 3y ago
  If you are looking for an upgrade to make playing Doom today look like it did in your memory, there's https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project Review by Digital Foundry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-aVt77epQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-aVt77epQ4
  - usefulcat 3y ago
    That actually looks great. Slightly more detail but still bearing a very strong resemblance to the original.
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    https://freedoom.github.io/ https://freedoom.github.io/ has tons of free doom mods if you want to check out what the modding community has been up to all these decades.
- taneq 3y ago
  We've come full circle on low-rez graphics, at the time it was the best definition they could generate but now it's an aesthetic. The original Doom graphics work surprisingly well in VR, too. Fire up GZDoom with the VR mod (some fiddling required to make it work in Windows MR) and it works in a way I wouldn't have believed without seeing it.
  - troupo 3y ago
taneq 3y ago
> it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. I've been referring to this as "baked-bean-ification". Something originally quite distinctively spicy and varied gets progressively fine tuned for the mass market, resulting in a universally inoffensive and yet immeasurably bland experience.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Into the Breach (turn based) can be played in ten minute campaign bouts if you have the self discipline. Katana Zero is about ten hours of gameplay total in side scrolling fighting game sort of like Double Dragon.
- psd1 3y ago
  I'm still looking for something to satisfy that Into The Breach itch.
  - stevenwoo 3y ago
    Based only on the trailer, there's an upcoming Switch game, Unicorn Overlord, that looks like a reincarnation of Heroes of Might and Magic. Slightly more than Into The Breach.
    - psd1 3y ago
      It's for several console platforms but not, alas, PC. I'm also not a massive fan of busy saturated graphics. Good tip, though. I'm currently playing Invisible, Inc and loving it. It's more akin to XCom 2 in pace and scale than Into The Breach, though.
acomjean 3y ago
I played doom recently on Linux. I have almost all the original wads from Doom box set. One thing that struck me is how fast you can move in that game. But the not being able to look up can make it a little wierd. I like simplier story games sometimes. The uncharted series I thought was fun, you get 2 weapons and maybe some grenades. Lots of cut scenes. Compared to some of the inventory and level up trees I have seen it was refreshing. Watching my partner play fallout 4 I was amazed at the inventory management required. On iOS when I need a quick game, I’ll play plasma sky which is a modern galaxan style shooter.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >But the not being able to look up can make it a little wierd. Install GZDoom over it. You're welcome. https://zdoom.org/downloads https://zdoom.org/downloads
- keyle 3y ago
  yeah that's why many modern FPS are considered walking simulators. Back in the day, e.g. quake 3 arena, flying, jumping, always running was exhilarating. Nowadays... cut scene, NPC hand holding, fake action to tutor... I get it, they lose less people from research groups, at the cost of the real gamers that know the basics. Also the art team literally spent a month on a room that you can just jump through? What a waste, no, the player has to be stuck here for a solid minute, walking slowly, bobbing the camera side to side etc. I'm convinced that to have games that people fly through quickly, you need either procedurally generated content or PS1 and older type graphics. With realistic graphics, it's impossible, unless it's a closed-room situation.
syspec 3y ago
Try Aoe2 I never played it until last year, and now it’s my favorite game of all time
- chpatrick 3y ago
  From little known indie studio Microsoft.
  - syspec 3y ago
    Created by an actual little known studio, Forgotten Empires, and /published/ by Microsoft
raytopia 3y ago
I wish itch.io was more popular there are so many interesting games on there but like you said not enough people playing.
arvinsim 3y ago
As a long time gamer, it looks like I prefer small indie games for skill/exploration based play and AAA games for linear, narrative rich experience.
barrkel 3y ago
Doom gameplay has aged quite well. The sprites have a bit of "cardboard cutout" quality to them in higher resolutions, but the gameplay is still really good.
Kiro 3y ago
Surely you must have a better example than Fez. I think it's beautiful. I love that kind of clean pixel art.
- hbn 3y ago
  If anything I'd say Fez's real achievement is the art. Once the novelty of the 2D/3D hybrid gimmick has dried up (which happens pretty fast), the gameplay is pretty mediocre. If you watched Indie Game: The Movie, it seemed like pretty much the entirety of Phil Fish's effort went into obsessing over the art. And I have to give him credit that it looks pretty damn good.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Dead Cells, HLD, both have much better art styles than Fez. Fez’s worlds were great but the choice of 16px vs 32px limited it in details, hence geometry carving of the 3D world to add more detail impossible to achieve with pixel art tiled textures without overdraw. I’m not saying I disliked Fez, but to compare the art of Fez to Chronotrigger is like holding a child’s finger painting to a Van Gogh. From a distance they may look the same…
  - Kiro 3y ago
    That's just your opinion. There is no objective "better" here.
coldtea 3y ago
>Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. Huh? I find it has aged just fine, aesthetics wise. Or do you mean the lower res of the original?
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless. I so strongly agree with this. There's a certain sense of "exploration of the game" that's missing in AAA games. AAA games are just entirely too smooth as experiences, there's no jank, very little learning, etc. I don't necessarily mean exploration as in, exploring every bit of content/land, but learning the game itself. When Pillars of Eternity came out, so many people didn't like it because they were surprised by the idea of having to actually learn the underlying system. I was hopeful for VR for a while because I figured if the developers themselves haven't "solved the problem", there would be a return to that type of exploration where a game would often have amazing parts and then parts that didn't work as well.

gumballindie 3y ago

> Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects. This worked well for romero and carmack. A game a month was it? That's how you refine your skills.

rpdillon 3y ago
Indeed...Doom was Romero's 90th game! https://gamerant.com/john-romero-doom-90th-game-made/ https://gamerant.com/john-romero-doom-90th-game-made/
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Seems... deeply misleading to draw an equivalence to today. The market is vastly more competitive.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    But back then it was much smaller. Suppose some will always find an excuse as to why things may fail today vs yesterday, while others will find a way regardless.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      That is not nearly the same thing as saying the strategies of yesterday are applicable to today
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        The strategy of refining your skills through extensive practice is as old as success itself.
        spywaregorilla 3y ago
        And yet adapting and innovating is the, slightly younger, vastly more successful brother.

LarsDu88 3y ago

"13 games that we made in 1991 alone" Wow. And these games weren't just shovelware. I grew up playing Commander Keen games, and to this day have not finished a single one.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I remember playing it as a kid and I couldn’t even beat a single level

dcchuck 3y ago

Looking forward to reading this, thanks for putting it on my radar. I really enjoyed Masters of Doom - which has been discussed here plenty on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=masters+of+doom https://hn.algolia.com/?q=masters+of+doom

orliesaurus 3y ago
I personally felt Masters of Doom being better than this one, this had too much "life" drama in it IMHO

orliesaurus 3y ago

Kinda a diff topic but if anyone else read "Doom Guy" - what did you think of it? I know it's not what this interview (blog) is about but I feel like compared to Masters of Doom this one had a little too much "narrative" and "drama" and felt like it was an answer to certain things discussed in Masters of Doom which he wanted to set the record straight. Another weirdness - i.e. early into the book John Romero says that he has a super-power like ability to remember everything perfectly...which to me sounds like some big ego bullcrap? Because there are a lot of things that he conveniently did not discuss in the book but which fans know happened! So what kind of super-power

MegaDeKay 3y ago
I just finished Doom Guy a few days ago and really enjoyed it. The start of the book is definitely not what I (or probably anybody else) expected but it was a hell of a story. I also appreciated his honest conclusion near the end where he comes to the conclusion for his post-Id failures. I did think he should have gone into more of a deep dive into why Daikatana was a bad game. Yeah, turnover. Yeah, delays from chasing the new shiny engine. But for a company he started where "Design Is Law", why did his game suck when Deus Ex being developed at the same time at the same company turn out so great? And how was id able to pump out Quake II and Quake III in the time he was buggering on Daikatana? Somewhere in the book (start or end, can't remember) there is a quote from Carmack that references Romero's amazing recall ability, so I'll give hime the benefit of the doubt here.
- nfRfqX5n 3y ago
  I'm not quite finished with it but I thought Masters of Doom had more drama. This one had more personal/childhood stuff, which I wasn't personally interested in. Romero's narration of the audiobook was a bit quirky though
- bombcar 3y ago
  One thing I've learned from reading the Factorio blogs is that you can easily get caught up in details and forget to make the game fun.
- 3y ago

bitwize 3y ago

I was just thinking about Romero. I was watching the "Wha Happun?" episode about the System Shock remake, and I realized... back in the day we made fun of Romero for his mismanagement of the Daikatana kerfuffle: schedule slip after schedule slip, changing engines twice, the staff quitting and needing to almost be completely replaced, it's no wonder the game turned out crap. But so many of today's games have most or all of these problems. System Shock (2023) changed engines, had massive staff churn, and considerable schedule slips (taking seven years to Daikatana's four), especially when COVID-19 hit. But by paring back the ambition and focusing on delivering an experience faithful to the original, they got it out the door despite doubts from the fan base and it was a hit. So today, some games do turn out good despite mouldering in development hell for the better part of a decade. Of course you still get your fair share of buggy messes (which may be rehabilitated with a post-release patch) and complete misses like Mighty No. 9. So it seems like maybe we've hit a complexity threshold beyond which it stretches human feasibility to turn out a good to great AAA game within a reasonable time frame. And maybe Romero was just one of the first people to "go big" with Daikatana, and he hit that threshold before everyone else. His ambition (and ego) exceeded his actual reach, but... few if any had attempted such a large scale project before, aspiring to reinvent the FPS and add RPG and story elements to it. Granted, Half-Life made everybody else look like chumps when it came to embedding story into an FPS -- but Daikatana was announced long before Half-Life congealed. The man deserves full credit for learning from his most famous boondoggle, and focusing on smaller games rather than epic genre-busters that he doesn't quite have the ability to manage the development of.

logicchains 3y ago
The Daikatana marketing really had a lasting impact; even now when I see the name John Romero my brain autocompletes "is gonna make you his bitch!".
whatever_dude 3y ago
I used to make fun/hate the guy, but nowadays I can tell her really cares about games, he just bit more then he could chew and was too inexperienced to properly deal with it. The bit about being non-confrontational (and this being a hindrance during the Ion Storm days) also hits home. I would have spiraled out of control myself in that position I'm sure.

skadamat 3y ago

These ideas hit home for me and heavily overlap with the ideas in How Big Things Get Done: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

GreenJon 3y ago

It’s a fantastic read, and with his sense of recall being so strong it provides a lot of detail you other might not get. He does say in the end he might have made it a bit more positive than some of the moments may have actually been, but I’ve not seen any of the other people from those times contradict what he’s said. I also found that Shareware Heroes by Richard Moss was a good, if more general, accompaniment.

WoodenChair 3y ago
Yes, although it's worth noting it's only a few chapters of Shareware Heroes. For those curious about Shareware Heroes, I interviewed Richard Moss (the author) about shareware a couple months ago on my podcast: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/67e565b5/shareware-with-richard-moss https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/67e565b5/shareware-...

sillysaurusx 3y ago

If you’re into nostalgia, John is live talking about open source / quake, but mostly AI: https://www.youtube.com/live/aM7F5kuMjRA?si=jBbM-n7m9h1_DmvN https://www.youtube.com/live/aM7F5kuMjRA?si=jBbM-n7m9h1_DmvN

justin66 3y ago
Different John. In some ways more noteworthy - Carmack speaks in public less often than Romero.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Whoops, I meant Carmack. It’s a habit calling him John. Sorry for the confusion.

mdswanson 3y ago

If you're here because you're a FPS fan, you should check out the new FPS Documentary: https://fpsdoc.com/pages/limited-run https://fpsdoc.com/pages/limited-run

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
That was a great watch.

hresvelgr 3y ago

The biggest thing that kills indie developers is taking a waterfall approach to game design. "I want to make an XYZ genre game with mechanic ABC and a story about 123." There is absolutely no way to know if that combination of designs will be fun at all, and it won't be until they're too far in development before they realise it's irredeemable. Best advice I ever got on this subject: identify what you want the most impactful element of the game to be. Is it a unique combat mechanic? Is it a compelling story? Make that first and only that. If it's impactful, take it further and build more around it. Show it to people as early and regularly as possible. If people tell you it's boring, they're probably right, but don't listen to them if they tell you how to fix it. If you can't fix it, toss it and move on. You cannot afford to find out if your game is fun 2 years into development. Also, most of your ideas are probably terrible and you won't start having better ideas until you make and finish a number of projects.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aikinai 3y ago
This is the secret to Nintendo’s success. Despite being a very traditional Japanese company, iterative, agile development is in their DNA. They experiment with a lot of different game mechanics that might be fun, test them early on other people in the office, and then when they find a core mechanic that seems like a game can be built around it, they start fleshing that out, add other mechanics that work as sweeteners, and build up iteratively. Only when they have a good picture of the game do they start piecing together some sort of story or setting that makes the mechanic make sense. Even the IP might be swapped entirely to something that better jives with the mechanic, or just to stick on a brand that will help it sell. That’s why their games stay fresh and fun and they can maintain their innovative edge.
- kqr 3y ago
  > Despite being a very traditional Japanese company Huh, isn't the idea of agile development to lift lean from manufacturing to development? And lean is very Japanese, at least in some sense!

shultays 3y ago

People that had success decades ago seems to be forgetting that it was decades ago. Doom was released 30 years ago. In a much, much smaller market and in a lot less competition. He is saying people are not making smaller games before moving to bigger projects but people, collectively, are doing that. For every "13 games that we made in 1991 alone" back then, now there are probably 130 games that gets released everyday. Not one of them will probably make any real money let alone be popular. It is a bigger market. Sure you are increasing your chances if you release more, if you get better but still it is mostly about luck at this point for indie devs. Even with the name John Romero and some big publishers behind he is not able to replicate his success today

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kanwisher 3y ago
Check out https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ there is whole communities of people that are constantly making small games. Better to get your feet wet then to jump into a giant game
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lproven 3y ago

This is a very poorly written article. Some examples of the multiple things leap out at me as bad style: > John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale The title is styled in block caps. So in fact it says JOHN ROMERO ON HIS BOOK DOOM GUY What is a "book doom guy" and how can Romero own one? Sloppy. > Posted On September 25, 2023 By zukalous And yet, "CZ" is used as the interviewer shorthand. So how are we supposed to know who C.Z. is? That's both sloppy and deceitful, as the author is trying to hide behind a poor pseudonym. Grow up. > I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” Quotation marks are not emphasis. This is a #fail. > it occurred to me that at the start, he and the founders Comma splice. Very poor English. > My meeting John Romero at GDC 2022 "My meeting $PERSON"? That's both bad style and broken grammar. "My meeting with $P" would be better. "I met $P" would be better still. "The author and $P" would be better than that. Almost anything would be better, in fact. Eugh. > CZ: How did you scope it? "Scope" is not a verb. Arguably, "scope out" is a phrasal verb, but the author -- I use the word very loosely -- doesn't say "scope out". > The scoping on our very first game Yeah, it's not a gerund, either. Oh, there are so many it's just painful to read, and I have better things to do than sub-edit this. > What Software company offices looked like in the late 80s. Random capitals. Missing apostrophe. This is just such a mess, with random passive voice and all sorts of bad writing, and not so much bad editing as no editing. I gave up. For me, this is unreadable. Shame: Romero is an interesting man and this was an interesting time in the industry.