Icarus Studios News

Why do I get out of bed each morning? (Besides the fact that the cats sit on my face, slowly trying to suffocate me in an attempt to ransom my oxygen for their breakfast.) I get out of bed because I’m a game designer and editor. Which means my job is creative. Which means I get to make stuff up—really fantastical, random, certifiable stuff, like talking pillars of flame that bear close resemblance to the symbolic representation of deities in ancient Sumerian mythology—and people pay me for it.

One of my favorite aspects of my job is camping out in the Writers’ Room, which is what I’m calling one of the two cozy offices in which my Virtual Worlds team resides. I call it this because it makes me feel important. (And also because I have yet to find the secret passage to Narnia in the back of our work space—but I know it’s there.) However, in this case, the close proximity is to our benefit, because while we await new supplies and feedback on previous projects with what can only be described as saint-like patience, my team gets to sit in round robin sessions and bang out problem-solving solutions for our clients or interesting new concepts for our properties.

Now, as you probably are aware if you’re a gamer, MMOs and virtual worlds don’t have a beginning, middle, and end, like single-player console games do. There’s no “final goal,” because the online world never ends. And no one player should have the ability to permanently change anything about the entire world. If you kill the big boss of your MMO, that doesn’t mean he’s gone forever and no other player in that massive shared experience will ever see him again—that would suck the fun out of the game the way my Dyson sucks up clumps of cat fur. But every once in a while, for a client demonstration or a tutorial exercise, a scripted experience is required. And unless you’re doing something experimental, scripts usually have a beginning, middle, and end (otherwise known as “plot”). There are also characters and they have dialog and objects with which they interact. Things happen. It gets wild and crazy. Something in the world changes. You get where I’m going with this. And, in addition to the scripted event, my team will probably throw in some side quests, mini-games, and points of intellectual interest, because we’re overachievers.

So, the four of us—John, Stephen, Miri, and myself—pretty much chain ourselves to the chairs for however many hours it takes to hammer out a beat outline*. Sometimes, this process is pretty easy. After an hour or two of discussion, we all agree on something—there’s no bloodshed, we draw straws, someone writes up a formatted treatment, and a script is born. Other times, hours crawl by. Crates of food and beverages are air-dropped from well-intentioned UN relief workers. John and Stephen begin to sport five o’clock shadows. Miri and I take turns lying under the desks, pressing our palms to our eye sockets so we can jam the migraines back in. But don’t let my griping and whining fool you—no matter how long it takes, we eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.

Sometimes, we get so excited that we act out scenes. I admit I’ve been known to crawl over desks and use random office supplies as props. When that fails, we often resort to drawings of our ideas, but my lack of artistic skill is so disturbing this probably will end in a lawsuit one day. When people peek into our office, it may look like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but trust me, these manic sessions are productive. Other times, we just sit there, babbling catch phrases at each other until something sparks our imagination. But we’re a pretty creative bunch, so sooner or later, we latch onto a good idea, pick a direction, and just go with it. Of course, every step of the way, we have to check in with Art, Production, and the Programmers, because if our scripts call for any new animations, characters, pathing, or creature brains, then we have to work out scheduling issues with other departments or make revisions to our script. And if the new characters need any additional dialog to be voiced, that means someone has to bribe the voice director and sound engineer. (Do not underestimate the power of dark chocolate.)

So, after we’ve covered all our technical bases and hammered out all our creative issues, we write up a soft prose pitch and toss it at our boss, Christopher (whose good nature and infinite compassion probably are the only reasons I haven’t been shoved into the aforementioned illusive Narnia-portal yet). If Christopher has tweaks he’d like, we make them; then, one of us types everything up, which takes more skill and experience than you might think. The trick is to describe things in such a detailed way that the artists have a crystal clear idea of what they’re being asked to create—but the wording also needs to easily translate into the technical jargon the programmers enter into their tool sets. We’re a tight-knit crew here at Icarus, so there’s rarely a breakdown in communication. Nine times out of ten, anything the artists or programmers come up with looks even cooler than what was originally envisioned by us in Content, so there’s a lot of trust between the various departments and we’re all happy with the final products.

After the script is tweaked, formatted, and green lit by the decision makers, it’s out of our hands—unless my team is asked to help enter the data into the tool sets, which is the design part of a game designer’s job, and also a lot of fun. Seeing something you’ve envisioned in a writers’ room session come to fruition in a virtual world is extremely satisfying—so much so that it makes miming zombies, drawing disturbing stick figures, and arguing about the back story for why a spiritual rock monster and demon-possessed wolves would duke it out an ancient Mesopotamian forest more than worth it. When you work at Icarus, there are plenty of reasons to bound out of bed in the morning.

* This is where Post-It Notes come in handy; I especially enjoy arranging them in chronological order on the wall and then color coding them based on the mission types, because I have OCD. Luckily, in this job, that’s a bonus.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team