Vaporware

  Vaporware

  By

  Richard Dansky

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright ©2013 by Richard Dansky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  www.journal-store.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-936564-77-4 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-936564-78-1 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935627

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: May 24, 2013

  Cover Design: Denise Daniel

  Cover Art: Vincent Chong

  Edited By: Dr. Michael R. Collings

  Endorsements

  Imagine you’re sitting at a bar, surrounded by videogame industry veterans. They’re telling war stories about their past projects, the kind of stories you’d never see repeated in interviews or online magazines, the kind that are insider legends. Everyone’s laughing out of shock or horror at some of the stuff we go through to release a game before Richard Dansky launches into his tale. That’s when everyone shuts up, because Rich is telling a story, and when Rich starts talking, you know it’s going to be a hell of a ride…. - Lucien Soulban, Writer, Far Cry 3

  Nobody knows the messy collision of writing and game development better than Richard Dansky. And for anyone who's ever poured heart and soul into a creative project only to watch it die, Vaporware is hauntingly, and almost uncomfortably, familiar. - Jay Posey, Writer, Ghost Recon Future Soldier

  Dedication

  To anyone who’s ever crunched, fought feature creep, planted an Easter Egg (or dug one up), playtested, playtested some more, killed bugs, done level reviews, checked in code after midnight, cleaned up after someone who checked in code improperly after midnight, watched their feature get cut or their project get killed and gone back for more because, damnit, we’re making games - this one’s for you.

  And for the loved ones - spouses, children, parents, siblings and dear friends - who are there as we do it. It’s for you, too.

  Thank you.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have happened without the help of an awful lot of people:

  First (and second and third and other bits) readers Leanne Taylor-Giles, Zach Bush, Erin Hoffman, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Michael Fitch, Crystal Muhme-Fitch, Jaym Gates, Jay Posey, Mike Lee and Olivier Henriot, for their invaluable feedback and endless patience.

  The Bastard Sons of Mort Castle. Don’t ask.

  My agent, Robert Fleck, for finding the book a home and regularly whupping me at Scrabble.

  The late Janet Berliner, very much a mentor and very much missed.

  The fine folks at JournalStone for taking a chance on something a little different.

  The team at Red Storm Entertainment, as talented and dedicated a group of developers as you’ll find anywhere. Special shout-out to the Design Department and all those who’ve been part of it over the years- someday, we will all meet at Circus Burger again.

  The folks at Ubisoft Paris and all the studios around the world I’ve had the chance to collaborate with.

  Patricia Pizer, Noah Falstein, Kevin Perry, Brian Upton, Alexis Nolent and the other experienced developers who were generous enough to take me under their wings and show me the ropes of game development when I was starting out.

  The members and leadership of the IGDA Game Writers Special Interest Group.

  My family, for encouraging me to write, even when it’s books about scary blue people crawling out of monitors.

  And most of all, my beloved and brilliant and patient wife Melinda, without whom, this would never have been.

  Chapter 1

  The woman onscreen was blue. She was also faceless, lithe and predatory in her stance and graceful in her movements. Her softly glowing flesh was covered, barely, in what looked to be skintight body armor, beetle-black and iridescent. In her hand was a lethal-looking pistol, smoke drifting from the barrel as she gazed down upon her victim.

  He lay on the floor, limbs contorted like overcooked pasta. A big man, he’d taken several shots to kill, as evidenced by the multiple scorch marks scattered across the surface of his powered armor. The faceplate of his helmet had been smashed in, revealing a dark and indistinctly bloody mess underneath. His left hand twitched once, then released its grip on the pulse rifle he’d been holding.

  It clattered to the polished steel floor, and, casually, the faceless woman kicked it away. She stood there a moment, her head cocked to one side as if she were waiting for instructions from some outside voice, and then suddenly she moved. With serpentine grace, she swung one leg over the corpse and lowered herself onto it. Her movements were undeniably lascivious, her intent clearly to grind herself into the dead man’s face in a way that wouldn’t be allowed on basic cable.

  Which is when I decided I’d had just about enough. I leaned over to the man next to me, whose eyes were plastered on the screen, and elbowed him in the ribs.

  The wireless game controller he’d been clutching like his favorite teddy bear dropped down into his lap, and the shock of the impact straightened him up in his seat. “Hey! What’s going on?”

  I pointed to the television hanging on the wall, a 72” flatscreen monstrosity that cost more than some cars I’d owned. “What the hell are you doing, Leon?” Onscreen, the action was frozen, the female figure caught mid-squat. A blinking error message announced that the game had been paused and told us that we needed to press the X Button to continue; blorp-heavy dubstep played softly in the background.

  Leon swiveled his chair around so that he could face me, his long legs kicking against the floor to speed the turn. “What’s the problem, man? I was just doing what comes natural in multiplayer. You get a kill, you hump it. End of story.” He held his hands up in a gesture of innocence and good faith. “You’ve got to admit, it looks good.”

  “Yeah, if you're fourteen,” I said, disgusted. “Haven’t we moved past humping animations as a feature by now?”

  He grinned. “Only in games that suck.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Give me the controller.” I held out my hand.

  Leon shrugged and tossed it to me. “Suit yourself, man. Not my fault you're pissed off because you're old and whipped.”

  I caught heavy plastic and hit a button, quitting out of the action. Onscreen, the faceless female figure simply evaporated as I worked my way back up the series of menus to the main game shell screen, a throbbing azure logo that read Blue Lightning over a list of options. “I'm not old,” I muttered. “Just a little more experienced than the XBox Live kiddies on daddy’s credit cards.” A thought struck me, and I looked up. “Where the hell did that animation come from, anyway? I never figured you for necrophilia.”

  Leon grinned, white teeth showing in a wide mouth that didn’t seem to fit on his long, sharp face. “I stole ‘em from the bar sequence in mission four. You remember the pole dancers you cut out of the level? The data’s still in there, and one of the animators merged it into the ma
in character’s set. Pretty smooth, don’t you think?”

  I took a deep breath, opened my mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. Instead, I took a moment to rub the bridge of my nose in the hope that it was going to keep my brains from exploding out of my nostrils in sheer rage, and turned back to the television. “It’s very cute,” I said, smiling in a way that I suspected didn’t get anywhere near my eyes. “And when you get back to your desk, I want you to disable the action and pull the animation.”

  “Aww, come on, man! It's beautiful. Hell, it's cool!” Leon was up and out of his chair, eyes wide, smile gone. Half a foot taller than me, he looked like they hadn’t used quite enough material to make him and nobody had bothered to correct the mistake. Shaven-headed where I was dark-haired, bony where I carried a few extra pounds, he looked like he was auditioning for the role of the Scarecrow in a prog-rock Wizard of Oz. Everything about him except his mouth was vertical, from the way he held himself to the folds of his black t-shirt, a souvenir of a Rush tour from the mid-90s that was positively flaunting its age.

  I stepped around him, and dropped into the chair he’d just vacated. “Look, Leon, the demo looks great. The physics rock. The particle effects are gorgeous. The gameplay is so goddamned there that it hurts, and we’re not even at alpha yet. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  There was a pause. Leon licked his lips and thought for a minute. “No.”

  I sighed. “What I’m saying is this: the game looks great. The game plays great. The game looks and plays well enough, as a matter of fact, that marketing is planning on leaving a copy of the alpha build with some of the bigger gaming sites and magazines so they can play with it on their own and really try to build buzz.”

  I paused, took a breath, and turned to point at the screen. “And what sort of buzz do you think we’d get the second someone took our game, a game with a strong female lead character, and made her hump a dead guy?”

  Leon looked down at the floor. “It’s not like we’d give them the cheat code.”

  I shook my head. “If it’s in there, they’ll find it. They found Hot Coffee in GTA, remember? And the last thing we need is for Blue Lightning to be known as the game where the hot blue chick dry-humps dead robots.”

  “But...but it looks awesome,” he said weakly, even as the screen cycled into attract mode, a short movie showing the best carnage the game had to offer in an endless forty-five second loop.

  “Come on, Leon, I’m not pissed. I’m just trying to look out for the game.”

  Leon blinked, and then nodded. “I know, man. I just thought it was cool, a little awesome for the multiplayer kids.”

  I grinned, to show him there were no hard feelings. “The kids are ungrateful bastards, and you know that as well as I do. But do me a favor and tell the rest of the guys in Engineering that it looks freaking brilliant?”

  Nodding, Leon headed for the door. He reached it, leaned on the handle, and looked back at me. “Hey, Ryan?”

  “Yo?” I didn’t look back. I was too busy retracing the sequence of button presses that got me out of the game and up to the main menu. Too many, I decided. It needed to be trimmed down by at least two.

  “I know there was a design reason for it, but I still don't get it. Why doesn’t the lead character have a face?”

  “Officially, it’s to keep the air of mystery around her. Once you put a face on her, she’s just like every other game character, and all the fanboys will be arguing over how hot she is and which celebrity we supposedly ripped off to make her.”

  Leon shook his head. “I know that. But we’re not saving anything on facial animations, ‘cause we need those systems for the NPCs, and I have to tell you, it’s kind of creepy. So what’s the real deal?”

  I turned, frowning. It was one of the more controversial decisions I'd made on the game, and not everyone was on board with it, even inside the studio. “The real deal, and it doesn’t go any further than this room, is that the publisher wants us to explore a custom facial construction system so players will be able to make their own face for the character, or scan in a picture from somewhere else, and really put ‘their’ face on the game.”

  Sputtering ensued, at least until Leon could get himself back under control. “That’s stupid. There’s already plenty of games that let you do face customization, and trying to add one in at this point in production is just going to make a huge freaking mess. You’ve gotta tell them no, Ryan. There’s no way we can do it, not with the time we’ve got left, and not have it look like ass.”

  “Plus, there’s always the possibility that fourteen year old boys will take pictures of their balls and use them for the facial image, which would cause all sorts of trouble.” I made what I hoped was a calming gesture. “Don’t worry, I’m with you on this. I’m not going to risk slipping on our ship date, or let anyone put a picture of their ass on our baby.” I looked back at the screen for a minute, then up at where Leon stood, expectant. “Besides. I kind of like her this way. I like her this way a lot.”

  “Uh-huh. Do yourself a favor and don’t tell Sarah that.”

  I shook my head to the negative. “Yeah, because the girlfriend so loves hearing about what I do all day.”

  “Then may that be your salvation, bro.” Leon’s tone was non-committal. “So you want me to take out those animations. Anything else?”

  I thought about it. “Naah. Run the build past Eric, but I think we’ve got something we can send to HQ for pre-alpha milestone approval. It looks good, man. It really looks good.”

  Leon grimaced. “I hope BlackStone feels the same way.”

  “They’re a publisher. They like making money. This game will make a shit-ton of money. Ergo, they’re going to love it.” I stood up, leaving the controller on the chair as the attract mode started again. On-screen, the main character poured herself out of a wall socket behind an unsuspecting guard before liquefying him with a lethal combination of firepower and kung fu. “New play mechanic, great graphics, and a strong lead character they can build a franchise on when they take the IP away from us down the road. If they market it at all, our baby is going to be a hit. A huge hit.”

  “Yeah,” Leon said, looking less certain. “If.” He shuffled out, the door slamming shut behind him, and then I was alone in the room with the game.

  I watched the door for a moment, to make sure Leon wasn't coming back with any more questions. A ten count, and then another ten left me sure enough, and I settled back in with the game. The attract sequence cycled through another time as I watched it, mentally ticking off features to make sure we were showing off the best of each one. Moving reflective surfaces to make characters literally gleam? Check. Advanced ragdoll physics to let bodies flail and twist as they flew through the air? Check. Destructible terrain and objects to let the player take apart the world brick by brick if necessary? Check. Independent muscular system animations, designed to make our models look like they were uniquely alive? Check. All present and accounted for. It looked good, it looked cool, and once we posted the attract mode loop online, it would get gamers salivating over the possibility of playing.

  At least, that was the hope. But the attract mode was just chrome, a dog-and-pony show designed to encourage people to get their hands on it. The real proof was going to be in the game, as it always was, and that meant putting it through its paces without any of Leon's juvenile bullshit.

  “Let’s see what you’ve really got,” I said to the screen as a new session lurched into its still-too-long loading process. “Let’s see what kind of surprises you have for the guy who dreamed you up in the first place.”

  The loading bar reached the far side of the screen, blinked once, and vanished. In its place, the words “Press Start” throbbed, bright blue and white against the black background. I pressed the Start button. Somewhere in the virtual distance, alarms started going off. I caught myself grinning wickedly, and then the killing began.

  * * *

  “Blue Li
ghtning,” I said, standing at the front of the room, “is a first-person shooter for the next generation of consoles, with unique gameplay, a compelling story, and up to 32 player online multiplayer.” I waved at the screen on the wall behind me, onto which had been projected an image of the game’s central character standing in an aggressive yet faintly suggestive pose against a gunmetal grey backdrop. In the corner of the screen was the game’s logo, a jagged affair that was mostly readable and instantly distinctive.

  I paused for a moment, looking around the room to make sure that what I'd said had been given enough time sink in. There were six people in there besides me, all seated in various degrees of slouch in the black leather chairs around the room’s central conference table. On the walls were posters and mounted blowups of magazine covers and articles, reminders of games that we'd made in the past. Normally they were bright and cheerful, a constant reinforcement of the quality of games that the studio made. In the dim, low light that the presentation required, however, they looked murky and a little old.

  Down the long wall on the right hand side was a whiteboard, scribbled over in mostly orange and brown. One column held dates; another risks, a third names. Green lines were drawn back and forth from one list to another, establishing which names (hopefully) would be able to fix which problems (ideally) by which date in the development process. At the bottom was a single phrase, written and circled in red: “SUBMISSION SEPT. 1.” It wasn't hard to notice that everyone in the room kept sneaking glances at it. That, after all, was the important information — dates and deadlines. I was just telling them what they already knew.

  “Hold on, Ryan.” Eric Jonas was long and angular, solidly constructed where Leon looked like he’d been made from scraps. He was the one sitting in the daddy seat; he was also the producer on the project, the head of the studio, and the ultimate in-house arbitrator of its progress and success.