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Story time

by Nathan Grayson (October 22nd, 2010 at 9:25 pm)

Game: Game Dev Story. Publisher: Kairosoft Co.,Ltd. Price: £2.39/€2,99/$3.99. Buy the game.

Game Dev Story wants to destroy your life. It’s an evil, evil little game, but only once it’s got you thoroughly seduced – its hooks driven in so deep that they’ve pierced clean through your very soul – does the game show its true colors.

It certainly doesn’t start out that way, though. In fact, when I first opened up my tiny hole-in-the-wall game development studio, I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Yeah, I got to crack the whip on a workforce of bite-sized pixel people, but so what? Half the time, I felt like I was watching an extremely intelligent, perhaps militaristic ant farm. The frighteningly apocalyptic ramifications of that notwithstanding, it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot going on. So I did some contract work. And I hired some new employees. And I pumped out an – in retrospect – ill-advised puzzle game about ninjas with a focus on hyper-realism, which critics described as “Hahahahahahahahahahaha *drops dead from lack of air*.”

Then I glanced outside. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “wasn’t the sun supposed to come out today?”

Yeah. Game Dev Story is that kind of game. It’s a brilliant mix of surface-level simplicity, deceptive complexity, and tiny people that frequently catch on fire. (Don’t worry about them, though. They appear to be completely immune to fire’s effects, which tends to be true of most actual game developers.) The game’s also brilliantly gratifying – turning the uphill climb that is game development into more of a marathon sprint where every step you take is rewarded with raucous applause, confetti, and lots of little numbers.

So here’s how it works: you start out with a ragtag band of four developers, each with different specializations (coder, writer, sound engineer, etc.) and horribly punny names. You can hire and fire as you please – something I quickly did to “Newb Ownertron” on principle. (I’d like to think he died horribly shortly afterward.) Beyond that, you really only have two main options: do contract work for some risk-free cash or dive into the deep end and develop a game.

Game development, unsurprisingly, is the meat of the game. To begin, you select your game’s theme and genre, which – if paired properly – yield all kinds of helpful bonuses. You also get to decide which platform you’re releasing on, what your focus is going to be (realism, accessibility, cuteness, etc.), and then you get to name it. After that, your squad of ant people sets to work on bringing your vision to life, all the while gaining research points – which can be spent to level up your dev team – and distilling their blood, sweat, and tears into a unique mixture of development stats like fun, creativity, graphics, and sound. Between all that and your choice of which dev team member does what at key points in development, the final product ends up being surprisingly personal. And, by extension of that, it’s one of the few games that’s ever made me feel genuinely proud of something I accomplished within its bounds.

And that’s the truly brilliant part. Each time you make it to the end of a dev cycle – which, in reality, only takes a few minutes – you get a small taste of the elation and fear that go part and parcel with releasing a game into a cold, judgmental market. After all, you’ve been there every step of the way: from conception to birth to the first wobbly steps. Then your game that you nurtured and named goes on shelves, and people judge it like a fat slab of meat. That’s the nerve-wracking part. Will critics like it? Will fans be willing to spend money on it? Sure, in reality, you’re only playing a game, but it’s still a powerful, surprisingly involving microcosm of the real thing.

So, after a couple discouragingly middle-of-the-road efforts, I brought a hard-hitting, extremely realistic historical simulation to market. It was called “Enemy Crabs.” And praise Videogame Jesus, it was a hit. Reviewers didn’t pan it, players ate it up, and I even received a gushy letter from an especially passionate fan. At that moment, I beamed at my iPhone like one might at their child scoring his/her first goal in football or when they finally reach that age where it stops being awkward to curse around them. Again, it sounds silly, but the emotion was real. People always talk about how games should be able to make us cry, but I think I like this better, whatever it is.

By now, this all probably sounds exceedingly complicated to you. Well, it’s actually not. Like, at all. Sure, your secretary, who works part-time as the tutorial, doesn’t do the best job of explaining the nuts and bolts, but the early goings are full of safety nets to keep you un-splatterfied while you learn the ropes. Better still, as with many great games, Game Dev Story’s only as complicated as you make it. If you just want to put things on autopilot and only be held responsible for the occasional key decision, be my guest. However, there’s also the option to micromanage a dizzying array of RPG-like stats, which – if you’re into that sort of thing – rockets Game Dev Story to the top of the list of world’s most potent narcotics.

So then, the take away points: if you do not have this game, buy it. If you do, play it. And if you created it, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. You may have mortally wounded my social life with your absurdly addictive game, but I think I love you for it.

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