Interview: Joshua Collins on The Corpament's Video Game Design Pro

Video games are big business. You don't have to be an industry insider to figure that out -- brands like XBox and PlayStation (and their parent companies) are familiar to hundreds of millions of people across the world.

But while the public is conscious of the video game industry, not many know how the games are actually made. The image of the lone coder slaving away at a computer in a clammy basement is a fading stereotype -- while some freelance or amateur work does take place in such environments, game development these days is far more likely to take place in an office park outside Seattle or Tokyo. The design, programming, and business skills required are simply too much for one person to handle. Large, distributed teams often have to work together over months or years to bring new titles to market. Successful project management skills are key.

The Corpament has a software tool that is designed to support such teams. Joshua Collins, the company's president, contacted me in late May to review Video Game Design Pro. I declined -- I use a Mac at home -- but he agreed to be interviewed by email about the tool and its features. A complete transcript follows:

Ian Lamont: What does Video Game Design Pro do that makes it so special?

Joshua Collins: Well, Video Game Design Pro is the only program of its kind. Most software applications out there related to game development are either extremely technically oriented (like programming, A.I. etc.) or art related. And this is great, except in our opinion the key component of any successful game development endeavor is often times overlooked, and that's the game's design.

So, to be specific, what VGDP does is handle a game's design via the medium of its development documentation. Most game development endeavors utilize these documents. And also these docs usually aren't read from beginning to end, front to back in someone's leisure, but rather they're used during the development process as reference materials, to quickly find the info that you need so you can get back to programming or designing or whatever it is that you're doing.

So that's also what Video Game Design Pro focuses on, that's one of its greatest strengths, and that's what sets its apart from any of the other game development tools currently on the market.

Lamont: Who is it aimed at?

Collins: VGDP is targeted towards developers from the entire spectrum of the development community, and that's what's so great about it. What you're going to see when you download a trial version of the program are customization and layout options that afford you the ease and power to be able to manage the design of a huge development endeavor, with multiple team members across various geographic locations.

While at the same time, you're going to see features and functionality that are conducive to novice designers, students, hobbyists, and people like that who want to go beyond the learning tools they currently have. And you'll see evidence of this when you go to our website and check out our customer list, you're going to
see some of our larger clients like Sony Pictures Digital side-by-side with some academic institutions, and that's the type of flexibility that Video Game Design Pro allows.

Lamont: How much does it cost?

Collins: Check our website for pricing.

Lamont: What platform/specs are required?

Collins: Pentium 233 or higher. Windows 98, 2000, ME, NT, XP, Vista. 64 mb RAM. 256 MB hard disk space.

*Internet connection required for Online Collaboration and gamedesignshare.com (though if you're reading this I'm sure that's not a problem).

Lamont: I'd be interested in learning about any examples of games or designs made with this product.

Collins: The example documents you'll see in the program and future design examples are usually made with VGDP. Of the clients we currently have, they're obviously using VGDP for their development projects, and soon we're going to start asking for submissions of designs from our users to post on GameDesignShare.com for others to read and critique.

Lamont: What standards, formats, and other software tools is VGDP designed to work with, and why was it important to build this interoperability into VGDP?

Collins: This is a great question. Well, VGDP has many forms of interoperability with the Microsoft Office family of products, .pdf's, Web pages, and rich-text formatted documents. The interoperability with the MS Office suite (specifically MS Excel and Word) was extremely important to the success of VGDP within the professional development environment. We listened to our customers early on and found out that this type of functionality was necessary in order to make the tool more useful. Most game developers already have MS Office installed on their systems and they use it actively throughout the development process, so it would be un-reasonable, impractical, and ultimately sort of foolish to not build into VGDP the functionality necessary to either augment that MS Office experience, or make the migration over to VGDP smoother.

The Portable Document Format functionality was built in to be specifically targeted towards those marketing professionals, or project managers who need the type of aesthetic appeal and consistency that pdf's are known for providing.

For example, usually game designs stay within the computer system during the development process. This is for many reasons but mainly it's because the documentation is massive, cross-referencing is easier, and so is version management. However, it's not unusual for a marketing manager for example, to actually print a physical copy of the game's Design Treatment (this is a kind of marketing and business plan for a video game) in order to hand it off to another high-level executive or management professional. The ability to export documents in Hypertext Markup Language was important for all the aforementioned reasons and so many more, namely all of the added benefits of having web-enabled documents with the simple click of a button.

What we were proud of and what our customers really appreciated was the ease and consistency in which this functionality performs. You select a game design, or a section of your game design, and hit export to .html, period, you don't have to sign up for a bunch of services or spend the entire night trying to learn how to use cascading style sheets, it just works.

And finally, Rich Text Formatted document compatibility was a necessity in order to provide a net of interoperability so as to never take away from the user the ability to determine their own workflow and the types of tools which that would call for.

More information is available from The Corpament website -- including a clever marketing animation.