I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the team working on what I decided to call Ravenwood Fair. At the beginning, I did art direction toward a painterly style until the lead artist, Christine MacTernan, totally got the look and took over from there. I created and coded all the sound effects, and worked with a great composer named Aaron Walz from Game Audio Alliance on the game’s looping soundtrack. He did an excellent job, as the song can be played infinitely without annoyance – the true test of a great composition.

The team was very small: four programmers, two concept artists, two animators, a UI artist, a producer, Brenda and me. That’s only 12 people. In addition, the game launched on October 19, which means it took 2.5 months to go from concept to ship. This causes many a social game publisher to gasp, but there’s a good reason for it: the team worked very hard, and they had already been working on several game concepts for 7 months before I showed up, so they were already “at speed” and no ramp-up time was needed.

When I arrived at Lolapps, the owners told me I could create whatever, as long as the game would make money and launch by September 30. That was less than 2 months by the time I started working on it. I knew I had to hurry up and come up with a concept, so I quickly identified the best game on Facebook at the time, FrontierVille, and played it for three days so I could understand its design patterns and monetization model (I had been following the social game space since 2009). Then, I got the scoop on the engine we were using and found out it was really fast and could draw a ton of graphics on the screen quickly. I learned from the lead coder how much code had been written for the previous game prototypes, so I needed to use as much as possible to keep moving forward and not go backward much.

The idea for the game appeared very quickly. The setting was going to be a fairytale/storybook/magical place that floated in the air and was occupied by a slightly scary forest. Since the biggest games on Facebook were business sims, I needed to have the player build their own little business, and I wanted it to be like nothing else on Facebook. I thought a Fair would be a really nice obvious positive goal for the player to build, and there wasn’t a carnival/circus/fair sim on Facebook……yet. My thought was this: when you’re building a place for visitors to come and occupy, why wouldn’t you want them to be doing something really fun while they’re there? What’s more fun than Disneyland? I imagined what it must be like at a high-level point-of-view to actually RUN DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida – to have to carve out a bunch of wilderness packed with alligators and other denizens, and then have to build a fun place in the middle of that – and KEEP it happy and fun, all the while the alligators and beasts want their place back. I figured that would be a fun game to play – as I cut back a scary forest, I build a Fair, visitors come and use all the things I’m building, and I get to interact with them in a light fashion. That was the basis of my design, so we had our first meeting, and the producer and leads wrote down the long list of things that we needed to start working on immediately.

After August, we were still working on the foundations of the game systems and entire art overhaul, when Brenda joined the team from Critter Island (it had been shut down by Facebook). Brenda immediately started working on the quests, the map layout, and the tutorial parts of the game. She had to basically try to get all the final parts of the game together while I was still working on the foundational stuff, and we had to make sure that they would meet in the middle and the game would be complete by September 30.

Near the end of September, to make the launch date, the game had been re-scoped and re-prioritized so much that it wasn’t going to be anything I’d want to play if we shipped it in that state. Facebook games are well-known to ship incomplete and get fixed post-launch. I’m not from that world – I’m from the world of “You only launch once” and the first impression is extremely important. There were game systems missing that absolutely needed to be included in the game for the design to harmonize, and it got very tense at the end of September with the execs pressing for launch and me holding the game back to make it great. Every day in October was a “Can it ship?” day. It took 19 more 12pm-to-4am days to get the game in a state that I’d launch. In fact, I held back on doing interviews about the game until I knew it was going to be something I’d put my name on. Finally, around October 15, the game was quality enough for me to do the Dean Takahashi interview in VentureBeat.

The game launched, but the team kept working. We had lots of holes to fill, and obscure bugs to fix. The launch on Facebook went as good as a launch could possibly go: millions of people played the game and hundreds of thousands still join every week. Brenda and I ended our consulting with Lolapps on February 25, 2011 so we could concentrate full-time on our new startup, Loot Drop, Inc.

Just recently at the beginning of March, Ravenwood Fair made the #15 slot on the AppData Top 15 Applications list – this list is of ALL applications on Facebook, not just games (over 125,000 apps are on Facebook). Ravenwood Fair is the #1 non-Zynga game, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Currently, over 25 million people play Ravenwood Fair every month on all social platforms (over 11 million on Facebook alone), and over 1 million play every day on Facebook only. I never thought I’d see the day that I would make a game that doubled World of Warcraft, player count-wise. I’d like to thank Brenda and Lolapps for giving me the opportunity, and the Ravenwood Fair launch team that worked so hard on the game.

Ravenwood Fair Trivia Time!

                          

In Pac-Man, the mess is the maze full of dots. You need to clean them up to achieve your goal of cleanliness. In Space Invaders, the aliens are the mess. Clean them up and you reach your goal. In Bejeweled you are presented with a messy screen of jewels. Arrange them in groups of matching 3′s and you clean it up, one match at a time. Chess? Clean the board of your opponent’s pieces, specifically his King. The ancient game of Go? Same mechanic.

The other powerful mechanic in game design is that of Building. Most great games combine these two mechanics such as any successful RTS like Age of Empires. Build your empire one unit at a time until you need to clean up your enemy’s mess of units. In Katamari Damacy, you are cleaning and building yourself constantly. RPGs are all about building and cleaning up the messy landscape of enemies.

Sometimes this mechanic exists at multiple levels within a game. Looking at the meta-design, you know that Resident Evil 4 is all about cleaning up the game world of zombies. Within this game you need to keep your inventory briefcase clean and optimized as well. And all the while you are building your arsenal to make all the cleaning easier and more fun.

World of Warcraft is the epitome of these two mechanics and both are executed at multiple levels in the game. Your character, you are building. The world, you are cleaning, so you can build more. Professions are building so you can make items that help with the cleaning….which feed into more building. The cyclical nature of the design is what all designers hope to achieve.

This tidiness theory, this instinct toward Order rather than Chaos, may be evolutionary and part of our DNA. My question is: if a person, when presented with a mess in any kind of medium, chooses not to clean it up, are they in danger of failing evolution? And are games, as a form of teaching how to build and clean various abstracted messes, helping us evolve?

                          

Well, what more is there to say about Quake? I love ‘im like a son. And I have some great memories of his birth, of his growing up, out in the world. All the LAN parties, all the levels, all the demos and speed-running contests and challenges… it’s been a great 5 years for good ole Quake. So good, in fact, that he got two brothers: Quake II and Quake III, who made their own way in the world; established their own unique identities and accomplished their own goals.

But to me, there’s just something about Quake 1, the original, that keeps pulling me back into its dark embrace. I think… it’s the rawness, the edgy violence and the unsettling, menagerie of wild creatures we pulled from the nethercore of our mind’s eye and then placed among the tattered ruins and ancient walkways of Quake’s wind-blown crevices and scenic vistas.

Creating those fantastic and impossible environments was a challenge from the very beginning. We were accustomed to having the editor, or at least the graphics engine, take care of such trivial things as connecting walls to floors, evenly lighting entire rooms, and making it easy to create doors and doorways. That was the familiar universe of our baby, DOOM. We were in the new universe of Quake, where once again we were inventing our own rules and trying to play by them, or at least create by them.

It took a while to get used to the freedom of creation in the new engine and to get the right feel for scale and space. Countless maps were worked on and discarded. I remember many maps that I thought were going to turn out great, but just didn’t make the cut in the end. I wish I had copies of those old guys — I spent a lot of time in them, thinking about them during their creation, learning how to create spaces with them. Really, the only visible remnant of my early, slightly-off perception of Quake-space is in e2m6, The Dismal Oubliette. In the area where you take the elevator through the three floors, the hallways are very cramped and dangerous — I didn’t have the right scale in there and didn’t have time to correct it before release, but I knew it was wrong. Ah, well. A defective gene was left in, but it’s not the only one, thankfully.

For a long time now, I’ve kept one remnant of Quake’s creation that I had to cut out. It’s the Lost Entrance of the Dismal Oubliette. Yes, there used to be a much more interesting beginning to that area of Quake, but I had to amputate the guy and cauterize the wound into its current state, the starting point of e2m6. I remember spending many hours trying to get it just right, to create the feeling of an awful, cavernous pit for the player to get out of and into the real horror of the Oubliette. It added a nice bit of gameplay time and I’m sorry that it had to go, but we set the .BSP file size at 1.4Mb and had to be strict about it.

But today, on Quake’s 5th Birthday, I will give you a personal piece of Quake’s creation that I treasure. Be careful with it, it’s fragile and one of a kind and was created back in the mists of time around QTest’s release. I’ve named the map E2M10.BSP and am including the E2M10.MAP that chronicles its creation. Looking closely at the .map file will reveal some long-lost entities that we had in Quake and I’m not sure if I even remember what they did…

e2m10.zip

The Dismal Oubliette

Unzip all the files in your quake\id1\maps directory, run Quake, pull up the console and type map e2m10 and spend a little time in a creation that was destined for release, but didn’t make the cut.