B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

Ben10: Battle Ready is up at cartoonnetwork.com. It's the first game I did for Pop, the project who's hellishly short production schedule also marked my slow shift of accepting all this as What I Do. It's weird, seeing it finally up and running and out of our hands. The first day it was up I'd load it on my screen at work just to look at it, all this dumb shit from my head made real on a screen.

It's too easy, first off; we never had a chance to find the delicate balance between too damn hard and too damn easy. Some of the levels feel nearly vacant, just a space to pass through on your way to the end, while some are teeming with robot goons bent on your destruction. When the chance came up to fix all that with an update that went live on Thursday, I fought and begged for the chance to go back through the levels and update the robot population a bit. When Mike shot it down under the time-honored clause of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," it sent a nasty wave of self-righteousness through me. How dare he fuck with my game, leave my game to go out in the world less than it could have been, fnar, fnar, fnar.

Thankfully, that only lasted a good five minutes or so before I realized how right he was.

The day after I was hired on full time with Pop, we had a pretty massive party. Lots of friends of the company, lots of old employees turned freelancers. I spent most of the evening talking to one of the latter, and he gave me some of the best advice for working here, or for doing any sort of work for hire gig, really: don't get attached. Past a certain point, you can't think of it as your game or your anything else for that matter. There's gonna come a point when, after dealing with a committee of different opinions, different wants, and different voices, you have to either stop caring or go completely insane. Mike, our genius programmer who Gets Shit Done, told me this little mantra of Scott, our occasional Illustrator of Doom: It's only a stupid game. It's only a stupid game. You reach a point where you have to let go of the idea and potential of what the game could have been, and realize that, as long as you're doing the work for some body else, it's only going to be what the folks with the money say it is.

So, there's stuff I'd fix, but that's okay. It's still bigger, prettier, and better put together than 90% of what CN wants you to pay money for. And for the first time out of the gate, I can live with that. Play it here and let me know what you think.

posted by chris  # 1:34 AM