Game designer: Ville "Burger" Vuorella

I am not even going to pretend to impartial: thanks to Ville Vuorella I've realized that i can create and design games and that no matter how weird idea there is, it might have a chance. 

To my readers of coarse it's probably irrelevant, but wait. Ville "Burger" Vourella is the man who wrote STALKER role play game based on original novel by Strugatski brothers. The amount and quality of work put in that book is astonishing. 

Ville Vuorella has been designing games for more than 8 years (full-time). He holds a English Philology degree with Games Research & Design and Academic Entrepreneurship as second specialization achieved in University of Helsinki. In addition he posses variety of skills and studies outside of ordinary curriculum, but very useful for the designers flow of art and craft, like Archeology, Medieval Irish and British studies. He also has EU Specialist Certificate in Game Scriptwriting. Vuorella has been not only game designer, but also an IT consultant and game design lecturer.

Though during his career (up to current moment) he has not worked (yet, i hope) on multimillion projects but he retains individuality and thoughtful approach to his work. One of the cornerstones of his work is a well structured design documents and concepts, which allows player to immerse into the game-world without the fear of being disrupted by the glitch or inconsistency.     
 
I'll just point out some of the 25+ games he was working on:

Stalker RPG, - a single serious RPG on stalker universe, complete with 5 Zones and unique game system. (https://www.facebook.com/StalkerRPG) 

 Burnout, Mobile phone game, for the company called Electronic Arts 

Need for Speed: Carbon, mobile phones version.

Crown of Byzantium: a MMO games based around combat achievements not pig farming. Unfortunately by the time of writing this words game ceased to be. 

HAX: MMO-cyberpunk game of freelance hackers (coming soon).
http://www.haxgame.com/en/


Vuorella's full CV in blog format could be found here: 
http://www.burgergames.com/notes/summer11.htm#220611
What's more important for me as an aspiring game designer is his blog, and honesty Ville is writing about creative process, his ups and downs and life as freelancer. I have never met him or visited his lessons, despite living in Helsinki for some time, but I cant stress enough how important and influential his working notes were for me while I was trying to understand how and why RPG systems work, and how to reach a certain understanding of what you creating. Again, I'm being personal and affectionate, but it's my blog, after all. 

Most creators and designers rightfully hide the workflow or kitchen of creation, Vuorella is not an exception, but the detailzation, thoughtfulness and openness of stuff he puts on his game-related part of the blog http://www.burgergames.com/notes/content.htm is really under appreciated.  

Last but not least, there is a healthy portion humor, rudeness and self-depreciation which only truly strong characters may allow themselves without the fear of being mocked. So that is my first entry of important game designers: Ville Vuorella. 

Thank you for reading.

  


            

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is dead. Why?

By the time you read this it's an old news: Stalker 2 as computer game was cancelled, though "we find it necessary to inform that GSC Game World and Sergey Grigorovich remain to be the sole owners of all the intellectual property rights to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series and the brand overall, including all the trademarks, the game universe, the technology etc. This can be easily verified with the trademark services online.", states company's official website http://www.gsc-game.com/. 

As a rule of our cynical world when king dies, his pants become a major point of profit. On one hand those who did not know about existence of this product will be curious, and hardcore veterans will spent some coin on final "golden" edition or side-line products like table-top game, hats and t-shirts. 

However, I'd like to elaborate why this game came to this sad conclusion, did not fared well on western market in comparison with other FPS games and lost big part of it Russian supporters. 

Starting with most obvious problem of any major game trying to become AAA (world wide) product: development time. Stalker was developed for almost 8 years before it reached people who waited for it. 8 years is enough to see a child walk and talk, and in computer game industry an entire generation of technology as well as clients taste has changed. During development this difficult baby had to refresh its graphics at least twice to be in line with modern shooters and other high-tech games. 

Post-soviet game developers have not yet been among creators of high-end games like Halo or Crysis. (Perhaps with exception Il-2 Shturmovik by Maddox Games, but this lies outside the subject of this post). Both these games have clearly stuck to tested path of FPS-bestseller: simplicity and power with lots of graphical candies and marketing support. Ever since Doom, FPS games have always been about player getting adrenaline high as result of shooting some bad guys (aliens, Nazis, commies, invaders, frags, demons, other players, underline one you prefer), all other things are quite optional, like storyline or surroundings. The trick of any good FPS game is how to justify appearance of another portion of enemies in order to keep player busy and high on adrenaline.

This is where we come to one of the biggest problems of Stalker - unclear concept.

Game was sold and positioned as SURVIVAL/HORROR FPS. However, as a survival it made player eat and take a lot of pills when screen was flashing with danger sings. My first reaction on seeing radiation sing appear was a bit of surprise. How can a human detect radiation without Geiger counter? Do i have a skill for that? Do i have that equipment? If that would be an RPG those question would be answered, but in this case i had to adjust to a flashing screen. It may seen minor but this is where survival in STALKER ends, leaving us with pressing buttons for another med-kit. It may be very FPS style, but its not horror. Later on in the game and its add-ons RPG elements were introduced into the game, but remained minor adjustments, rather than serious rethinking of how game works. 

On the FPS side STALKER does a fairly descent job. It provides you with gun, enemies who ignore head-shots, re-spawning frags and monsters, and impenetrable cover. In close quarters its still a good shooter, and will provide you with adrenaline and entertainment for some time.  

Now if you look at what as player has to do in the Zone apart from shooting at random monsters and walking around anomalies. You are suppose to do quests; find stuff, kill stuff, and get somewhere where your hero supposedly wants to go. This is a clear RPG territory, and luckily by third installment Call of Pripyat they made quest viable and important, not just a notes in the diary you never read or even notice. 

The roots of this idea lies in the free-to-explore-world concept on which STALKER is build. During early stages game developers mentioned that they looked for inspiration to Fallout and Fallout 2. These iconic games are not only RPG, they have a solid narrative base behind every location, quest and personalities. Unfortunately, this where is the weakest spot of Stalker: they gave us freedom, gun and shooting range but forgot why that world exists and what is out place in that world. Despite the great work on humor, endless fan-fictions its still a mystery what does our stalker feels towards Zone, factions and reasoning behind their conflicts.Whats more upsetting on occasion when we get a chance to recruit NPC they fit into profile of unnamed-guy-about-to-die-for-the-cause. 

One of the reasons that group of original Stalker developers formed 4A Games and started to work on Metro 2033 was, as they stated " that Stalker was trying to be everything a game could be". As a result it lacked something important, we may add.

To double the trouble of open world programming, scripting and creating Stalker does not have a major hero. Yes, you read that right. 3 installment and our main protagonist is deaf, mute and unlovable. He is clearly designed to be a focus for our own exploration of Zone, but what is he like? Mystery. There much worse games out there, for example some versions of Splinter Cell and its add-on games by Ubisoft Shanghai, but unlike Stalker, they carry on the day using power of Sam Fisher (or any other hero) charisma. By making hero a living, breathing and relating to world around him even a bad game can survive long enough to make a profit. 

This is one curious situation, to be fare. Despite all aforementioned problems Stalker lived for more than a decade, spawned a book series and recently a board game and some curious cultural activities like films and fan-fictions. Now it should continue its spirit as Survarium, another breakaway project. 

So, the King is dead. Long live the Stalker?