Postmortem: Worky's Challenge:
Seriously Safe At The Workplace- Josep Vicent Sala

Introduction

At Spanish game developer Exelweiss we have experience with several kinds of games: we have developed PC games, mobile phone games, web games (we are currently running a very successful gaming web site), and many years ago, our CEO even developed games for machines that today only belong to museums. But until very recently, we didn't have any kind of experience with “serious games”.

Worky's Challenge has been our first serious game, a game that was brought to us totally by chance. One day, the phone rang: an advertising company was looking for a game development company in order to develop an educational game. The game was an initiative by a mutual insurance company and the regional government of Valencia and was related to workplace risks. Workplace risks has been a touchy political issue in Spain lately. The number of injuries and deaths during work has skyrocketed in the last years. A burgeoning construction sector (which by itself has higher risks that other economic sectors) and the bad or nil preparation of workers in low-skill jobs have been two of the major culprits for this. Of course, the statistics have enraged the trade unions, a situation that has forced the government to adopt drastic measures to reduce accidents, measures which luckily seem to be working well for now.

One of the aspects in which the government has been working hard is in educating the workforce in the importance of following safety rules. Worky's Challenge is part of a multi-pronged campaign that includes several elements like lectures, newspaper campaigns and comic books and which is aimed mainly to young students. The videogame is one more element that completes the big picture and integrates with the rest of the campaign. The Worky character is the icon of the overall campaign, a muscular hero that heralds safe practices at the workplace as a way to improve the world around us.

Our prospective client, which was at the time evaluating development companies for the game, couldn’t tell us directly the kind of game they wanted. I suppose this will be something that many of the people involved with serious games will have to deal with. You get in touch with a client that works in a field unrelated to gaming that wants a game but doesn’t have any idea of the kind of game that wants, or that would better suit his/her objectives. You can’t expect someone telling you: “I want an RPG”, “I want a simulation”, etc.

Luckily, the people at the advertising company did their job carefully and had researched the gaming field thoroughly. They came to our office with a bunch of screenshots to show us how they would like the game to be. After seeing the screenshots, we arrived to the quick conclusion that they wanted a graphic adventure. I suppose this won’t be always so easy, but this time we had some luck.

It didn’t take long to close the deal. The project was scheduled to begin shortly and a swift decision was needed. Our experience and the quality of our work convinced the company to give us the project. Our responsibility was to develop the entire game, except the character voices that were to be contracted to professional actors directly hired by our client.

So, we went ahead with the game...

Things that went right

1.- Using the right tool for the job

After analyzing the scope of the project and the techniques we would be using to create the game (we finally chose 3D characters with a 2D background), we decided to develop the game using Macromedia Director 8.5 as our main tool. For PC games, we usually used C++ code and DirectX, but after positive experiences with Macromedia Director for developing web games, we decided that we would be more productive with Director. The version we are using is the first in which Macromedia introduced 3D support. We first began using Director at our company with version 8.0, but shortly thereafter Macromedia released the 8.5 upgrade with a shiny 3D engine that even included physics support. We quickly upgraded to that version, which is the one we are more comfortable with.

We have to say that Director is not a tool suitable for high-end games, but it had more than enough horsepower to handle the kind of game that we wanted to develop. Thanks to Director’s excellent development environment we were hands-on developing the game very fast and seeing results instantly. The first prototypes were a breeze to develop.

2.- Creative freedom

Letting the professionals do the job is a good policy for obtaining good results. The game design was left to us. Although the Worky character, the main story and the elements that should appear in the game were given to us from our client’s designers, artists and psychologists (and had to be coherent with the other material available in the campaign) we had a lot of creative freedom, mostly because the creatives were clueless about how to convert their material into a playable game. We designed the game storyline, the dialogues, the locations... This freedom led us build a game that lives up to our standards of quality and playability, and kept creative interference from our client to a minimum. But also, the way we “received” this creative freedom also had something of a negative impact (one of the things that went wrong).

 

3.- Artwork outsourcing

We are a small studio that doesn’t have an army of artists available for any project that comes around. A graphic adventure like the one we were developing required a lot of beautifully painted backgrounds that would have overwhelmed our art department. And in addition, lots of meshes and animations were required. We needed to get the game going as fast as possible due to the schedule we had, so we decided to go the route of freelance artists to aid our in-house artists. This demonstrated to be a smart move.

The selection of artists we made was right, and we soon had plenty of artwork for the game. The overall quality was quite good, although not enough to satisfy the high standards of our lead artist, who thoroughly polished all the artwork that arrived from outside. Despite this extra work, we had an enormous and vital boost in production speed.

4.- Automating work

This project has been a milestone in productivity to our company. We decided from the first moment that we should automate as much of the work as possible. This has a two-fold effect. On one hand, you can do things faster because you eliminate the boring, repetitive, and tedious tasks. On the other hand, you avoid making simple mistakes and bugs that can cost a lot of development time. Of course, automating things doesn’t come for free. We had to built tools, procedures and even a customized script system from the ground up that let us built the game effortlessly. The cost was not negligible but the payoff offset the cost by a very wide margin.

Thanks to our system, no programmer intervention was required to add new locations to the game. Everything was automated: walking paths, hot zones, dialogue... Using a simple paint program and our customized scripting system, any designer or artist could expand the game and see the results instantly. In addition, data to add the voices to the game was generated automatically. The script lines and the name that the resulting sound file should have was generated on the fly. We simply passed this information to the actors, and most of the time the intervention required to add the voices was minimum. Usually, simply placing the received files at the correct place was enough. If something was missing due to a mistake like a typo in the name of the file, our system detected it automatically and flagged it.

Development went like a breeze. I think that never before did we feel as productive as with this game. Everything fit in place with minimal effort.

5.- The result

At our company, we all agree that the greatest satisfaction from developing this game was the final result. The game was done on schedule and on budget and the result has been great for a game of this range.

The game has been brought to some schools, freely distributed in CD-ROM to young students and even a cut-down version has been used as part of lectures on workplace safety. Glowing comments on the press have appeared about the game and we are very proud of the results. We believe that a success like this will promote the demand for “serious gaming” in our country and will also have a positive effect in the overall perception of videogames as a positive new expression medium.

Things that went wrong

1.- The need for improvisation

The creative freedom we had was mainly a result of the fact that it is nearly impossible in our country to find a game designer outside a development studio. The video games industry is quite underdeveloped in Spain, and much of the skills and know-how is concentrated in very few spots. Games are designed by the people who develop them. As there were no creatives available in our client’s side that could develop anything resembling a minimal game design, we were only left with a bare story, some elements that should appear in the game, lots of documents related to workplace risks, and notes from the psychologists.

We had to absorb all of this quickly, because game development began at once. The overall cohesion and polish of the story suffered, due to not having an initial design phase, and the fact we were still receiving client requisites for the final episodes of the adventure after more than half the game had been made. The result was not bad, but we know that we could have done a much better game if we had more time for the design, and all the client requisites were fixed at the beginning.

2.- Difficulty mixed-up

Designing the game with the right difficulty level was crucial for a game aimed at young students. If a game is exceedingly tough for a given target age range, the educational goal can be missed completely, because the students can be unwilling to play due to a frustrating gameplay experience. A game that is too easy can be boring.

The problem that we had was that, at the mid-development stage, the target age that we were initially told changed, so we had to make a sudden change of difficulty. The second half of the game is tougher than the first (which can be too easy for some students). We didn’t have time to remake all of the game.

3.- Tools sometimes not up to task

Although Director gave us a very nice production boost, we had some problems with the rough edges of the development environment. Director provides lots of functionality, but this functionality comes “boxed” to the developer. Tweaking the rendering and optimizing was tricky, because we only could change what the environment let us. In addition, some minor functionality required to polish the game were not available at all. We worked around the problem of the missing functionalities with the Xtra extension mechanism that Director provides (coding what we needed in C++).

4.- Bad design decisions that we could not avoid

Although we had creative freedom for the concrete storyline, we had to follow some rules and indications from our client that, although they did not affect the game negatively, prevented it from being better. We were told that the game should give the player the option to select a male or female character to promote gender equality. Although we think this is a worthy principle to pursue, it added nothing to the game, while at the same time we had to dedicate a lot of extra effort to double-test the game to make sure both playing characters worked correctly.

We proposed alternatives that we found more constructive, like giving both the male and female character a concrete part in the game, so anyone playing the entire game should have to use both characters, adding in this way depth to the game. Sadly, we could not convince our client that this was a nice idea. In our opinion, putting two characters that act and talk always exactly the same is a waste of effort.

 

5.- Lots of extra work from approval-related details

After being finished, the game had to pass an external panel of workplace experts to make sure everything was correct. The game passed the first phase very quickly. It didn’t have bugs, the story didn’t have holes or inappropriate situations, the required subjects related to workplace risks were present in the game...

What we didn’t expect is that “background” details that didn’t affect in any way the storyline had to be changed. LOTS of them. Even simple details like the way a computer was placed relative to a window needed to be changed. A computer screen should not be directly facing a window to avoid screen glare. We could get away in this case by drawing a blind on the window, avoiding remaking the scene this way. This was only one of the many things that we needed to touch.

The workplace risks experts did their job thoroughly, and we needed to toil in accordance with this.

After finishing the game

One of the things that has made us happier is knowing that not only young students are learning important safety lessons, but they are also having a blast playing the game. One of the best design decisions has been the inclusion of arcade mini-games inside the storyline. Sometimes, the students get a bit bored going through the enigmas in the graphic adventure. By letting them relax a bit with pure arcade mini-games, they don’t learn anything new, but improve their reflexes and their attention to the game is renewed. Thus, they continue the main storyline with more interest, which affects the learning experience positively.

 

 

The game has been very well received, just as well as the rest of the campaign. In fact, there are rumors that the overall campaign will be repeated. We don’t know if there will be soon a sequel to Worky’s Challenge, so the students can continue battling Dr. Fatality by adopting safety measures and avoiding accidents. Anyway, it has been a delightful experience for us making this game and we are looking forward to the next “serious game”.