Taking the Mystery Out of Computer Game Design

San Francisco Chronicle Columnist John Carroll had this to say about Myst, "When matched against, say, Vermeer or Melville, it wasn't much, but in the limited world of computer games, it was high art. It was Shakespeare."

Carroll's feature of Myst, published in Wired, follows the computer game to its roots - back to the game's creative inception in Spokane, Washington.

The Humble Beginnings of a Cult Computer Game
Myst was brewed in the minds of brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, a pair of evangelical Christians. It's hard to believe that Rand Miller, who played the literal father of the original Myst (and does so with the subtle skill of a seasoned actor), lived in a double-wide mobile home in the backwoods of eastern Washington; and his brother Robyn, among the wheat fields and windmills of the Columbia Plateau.

The premise of Myst is the existence of a race known as the D'ni, who can create worlds through books. In Myst - and its sequels - the books serve as links between worlds, and also as prisons.

The game was designed using 3-D rendering software. It was an ambitious project for 1993 (The Internet had only recently caught on and Windows 3.1 was still in widespread use), ultimately materializing into 2500 rendered images, 40 minutes of music, 66 minutes of Quicktime animation, and a computer world that took two years to create (some of which happened in a garage, much like Apple was conceived). All of this was done on a shoestring budget and with a seven-person production team.

Getting the Right Details in Game Design
What made the computer game so compelling was its incredible focus on detail ? from the sound effects to the hundreds of individual trees and intricate wood carvings of computer-generated furniture. "We would build an incredible amount of detail into our models," said co-creator Robyn Miller in a video interview. "It would mean that we'd include everything up to the tiniest little screw or nail."

The challenge was even more pronounced with the sequel, Riven. In Riven, game designers had a cult following of a cadre of die-hard Myst fans to please - some of whom were as critical to the game's popularity as trekkies were to Star Trek's.

People also expected more, and computer game design software technology was expanding at an exponential rate. Indeed, Cyan faced many challenges in creating Riven.

Computer Game Design Changes for Riven

• In the original Myst, game designers relied on "tiling" - essentially using the same building blocks and pasting them onto the 3-D rendered wire frame. In Riven, however, designers took photographic images instead of using computer-generated (CG) tiles. The images ranged from Santa Fe adobe to corroded machinery at a junkyard - they even scanned a hand and manipulated it with software to make a realistic leather bed cover in Riven.

• Myst used Softimage in the creation of the original, but Riven required much more powerful game design software, using programs known as "shaders," to allow for ultimate control. Most of the game design software in Riven was created by Cyan, in-house.

• Myst had further complicated the design of Riven by spawning a series of novels, all of which constricted the game designers' storyline. For Riven, designers had to keep the story, language, and culture of the D'ni from the Myst novel series intact - otherwise the Trekkie-like following would fizzle, and Riven would have followed the route of neglected Godfather III and The Return to Oz videos.

The outcome, however, was rave reviews and a popularity that ultimately amounted to millions of units sold, making it (at the time) the best selling computer game series in history (The Sims now holds that trophy).

Begin your Career in Game Design College
Game design allows you to create worlds from your imagination. Myst was a prime example of such a surreal environment materialized. If you're interested in computer game design, you should explore the game design colleges listed on Design Programs.com. Your college degree in game design will help catapult your career, and open whole new worlds for your future.