Let's Make A Game! Episode 2

So if I'm going to make a game, one of the first things I have to sort out is what method I'm going to use to make it. I've settled on a couple of options as to the tools I can use:

1. Game Making software, like GameMaker. An interesting solution. You can do some really cool stuff with GameMaker. For what I want to make it might be the easiest to learn, but it's also one of the least portable. It's Windows-only, and there may be some licensing restrictions in there. It also wouldn't help me learn actual programming skills, which is kind of what I'm shooting for
2. C++. Everyone tells me that learning C++ is a byzantine mess. You need a steady hand and a firm guide. Plus, the amount of knowledge necessary to make a game is crazy, especially considering that I don't want to build crazy first-person wall-hugging simulators with bump-mapped textures and whatever else. In my mind, learning C++ would be like bringing a shotgun to a snowball fight- overkill.
3. Python. The most recent Civilization games are made with Python. Some people think that Python is ridiculously awesome and can do everything you want it to. That may be so, but it appears to be good language to use if you already know C++ and just wish it was simpler.
4. C# with XNA. XNA is designed specifically to make games. XNA is designed to be portable to the 360 and Windows Phone 7, as well as Windows itself. The recent hit Terraria was made with it. If we're using the snowball fight analogy from before, XNA may be akin to a laser-guided snowball-firing sniper rifle. It's possible that it'll do exactly what I expect it to while providing me a good foundation for other types of programming, including C++ and Python if I choose.

I think you can tell which route I'm leaning towards. C# with XNA it is.

As far as art and music, I've decided to make the art and music myself. Whatever game I choose to make will be in the style of an 8-bit game, so it won't be crazy-difficult to make the art. I learned the principles of music at a young age, so the music shouldn't be terribly difficult. I've decided to use FamiTracker for the music because of its ability to do exact replicas of the the NES sound chip and have found it incredibly intuitive to use so far. I'm going to use Photoshop for the sprites, just because I know Photoshop reasonably well and can manipulate it pretty easily at this point.

I'm going to try and be humble, as well. If someone has a better method of doing something, I'm going to use it with their permission. If someone made a really easy way to put together levels or whatever, I'm going to use that as well. However, I'll want to analyze WHY their code does what it does so that I can gain a better understanding of the underpinnings of the language.

With all that being said, if you have a programming horror story, words of encouragement or even words of discouragement, send them my way. I really want to know what people think of what I'm doing here. In the course of making my game, if you see me making a huge mistake, scream it at me. If you want to lend me a helping hand, it's entirely welcome as well.

So I'm Going To Make A Game

Like most people who spend any amount of time around video games, it's always been my dream to make my own game.



This dream actually started shortly after I learned about video games. I was about 7 years old and had barely played 3 or 4 video games TOTAL and realized that I wanted to make my own game. I used to spend hours drawing screenshots for games I would never make. I was very meticulous: Each screenshot had to show a new part of the game, a new level or a new boss. I couldn't make a game idea unless I had a real idea for it.

I made up six games called "Stanley & Marvin" and another six based off of some characters named "R. Williamson & Joe" that were typical platformers. I wish I still had pictures, but those are lost to the mists of time and my disapproving mother who HATED video games and didn't want them in the house.

A few years later, I put together a series called "Hopeless Hero" where the hero would beat bosses and take their powers just like Mega Man and another couple of games called "Super Chicken" that was a shameless ripoff  of Earthworm Jim.

I always strived to put in something that wasn't being done at the time. Another of the Stanley & Marvin games was full of collectibles that would make it easier to beat the game, and if you found a super-secret item, you would find the "true" ending. That's right, I predicted the collect-a-thons of the N64 era when I was 8.

For example, one of my Hopeless Hero games included its own game-within-a-game that would be unlocked after you beat the final boss, a robot named Omicron. You could play as Omicron through his own separate series of levels and beat the "real" final boss of the game who was controlling Omicron. That's right, unlockables. I was 11.

I also put together my own Mario games by carefully copying the sprites out of my Super Mario Bros. 3 strategy guide and inserting them in my new Mario games. One final level I invented was full of EVERY enemy in the game, all in the same level, including "Jelectro," the unbeatable electric jellyfish. One of my games included a final boss that you had to beat before the clock ran out. How did you have to beat him? By ripping the clock out of the ground and throwing it at him, that's how.

Bear in mind all of these games were formulated in my head before I was 12 years old, and you have an idea about how badly I wanted to make a game. By the time I got to high school, I still didn't have a computer, but I had a graphing calculator that enabled me to finally program my own games. With the generous help of a few friends in class, I quickly became one of the better programmers in the class. I threw together an arcade game with powerups, but my crown jewels were two RPGs that I made in a week for each one. They had their own leveling system which revolved around purchasing your upgrades so that the only resource you were worrying about was money.

I went on to make my own engine for graphing calculators to handle movement on a 2D plane while still allowing for random battles. All you had to do was supply the background image and the engine would sort out your movement. I had hoped to use this to make piles of high-quality RPGs quickly and with as little overhead as possible.

The funny thing is that I would come back a few months later to these programs and engines and be really pleasantly surprised. I would look at my code and say, "Wow, how did I figure that out so well? That was a really elegant solution to a complex problem." Never mind that no one else could understand my code (which I understand now was pretty important), I understood it perfectly.

After a while I stopped making game ideas. Whereas before I had the time and the help of other people to help me through programming, all my programmer friends went on to different things while I stopped trying. I got super-depressed for a while and did nothing but play Lords of the Realm II for about a year (still a great game, by the way) until the itch to make a game started taking me over again.

When I wanted to make another game, I kept looking for a magic bullet to make game making easy. I tried DarkBasic, a programming language specifically designed to build games. I never got any farther than putting a logo on the screen for my "company." I even picked up some books that promised to "Teach you game programming in 30 days!!!" Every single one of them felt like this:

Day 1: Create "Hello World!" program.
Day 2: Create the Matrix.
Day 3: Bend the Matrix to your will.

And so on.

I moved away from it for a while and decided to just write about games for fun. It's a heck of a lot easier than making them, right? But that itch, that darn nagging itch keeps coming back. I keep wanting to make a game, and I keep building worlds in my head that can't be realized unless I know how to use the tools.

As I get older, I realize that there IS no magic bullet to making games, or doing anything worthwhile for that matter. You can't just pick up a simple program and expect it to transmute your raw thoughts into gameplay. Learning programming and making games is a slog, but it's a slog that I've decided that I should attempt for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I'm getting older. I'm 29, soon to be 30. I know I still (hopefully) have a long life in front of me, but  the days are going by quicker than I care to notice. Why wait to follow your dreams?

Second, I have ideas. I know ideas are worthless by themselves, but if you combine them with effort and action, you can create great things. Most things in this world start because someone with an idea decided to do whatever he could to make it a reality. That's what I want to do.

Third, I'm coming around to that idea that anything worth doing is going to be horribly difficult to accomplish. I learned Spanish and it was incredibly painful. It was also extremely rewarding. I got married and found it to by incredibly difficult, but also one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. I can't believe it took me almost 30 years to figure that out.

For these reasons, I've decided to bite the bullet and make my own game from scratch with very little prior programming experience and document every second of the struggle on this blog. I may not even make a real game for five or ten years. I'm okay with that. I would be remiss if I didn't at least try, though.

There are going to be a LOT of naysayers that will tell me it can't be done, and that good ideas alone can't make a game. They'll say that I'm going to quit as soon as it gets complicated. I understand that. A lot of people do quit. I'll need a lot of support if I'm going to pull this off, but I'll also need to call on my own (admittedly small) reserves of fortitude.

I'm pretty excited to do this, and above all else, I'm excited to be sharing this with my readers. My sincere hope is that I'll inspire other people to pick up some tools and make their own games. Wish me luck.

3DS Price Drops! What Does It Mean?

The 3DS price has dropped from $249 to $169! But what about us early adopters? Nintendo hasn't forgotten about us. Here's a quote from their press release:

"Starting Sept. 1, Nintendo 3DS Ambassadors will be able to download 10 NES™ Virtual Console™ games at no charge and before they are available in the Nintendo eShop to the general public. These games, including Super Mario Bros.™, Donkey Kong Jr.™, Balloon Fight™, Ice Climber™ and The Legend of Zelda™, are slated to become paid downloadable games, but Ambassadors get them early for free. Once the paid versions of the games are posted to the Nintendo eShop later in the year, the updated versions will be available to Ambassadors for download at no cost.

By the end of 2011, Nintendo will provide Ambassadors with 10 Game Boy Advance Virtual Console games. These include games like Yoshi’s Island™: Super Mario™ Advance 3, Mario Kart™: Super Circuit, Metroid™ Fusion, WarioWare™, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ and Mario vs. Donkey Kong™. These games will be available exclusively to Ambassadors, and Nintendo currently has no plans to make these 10 games available to the general public on the Nintendo 3DS in the future."

Not a bad deal, I guess. First, let's get the snark out of the way, courtesy of ArsTechnica:

So there you go. If you already own a 3DS system, you'll be able to download a number of classic games for free, including Game Boy Advance titles that won't be made available to the general public. Isn't this why we all bought a 3DS to begin with, to play previous-generation Nintendo games in 2D?

This move may not have the effect desired by Nintendo. A quick price drop of this size sounds more like desperation than confidence and growth. A suite of free games that people may or may not want also doesn't do much for customers who will now feel like they overpaid for the system by a third. Yes, this is one of the risks of being an early adopter, but early adopters are a group of people you annoy at your own risk.

First of all, let's all calm down. I'm one of those early adopters, and one of the 3DS' selling points was the ability to play on the Virtual Console. Therefore, GBA and NES games make me incredibly pleased.

Nintendo is handing us a good deal. If you assume that each NES game generally sells for $5 on the Wii Virtual Console and every Super Nintendo game sells for $8 (which is equivalent to the power of a GBA), we're essentially getting $130 worth of games for free. Even if you only like half of those games, you're still getting $65 worth of games for nothing.

But what about the size of the price drop? That's actually kind of troubling, no doubt about that. According to Iwata, every 3DS after the drop will be sold at a loss. That means that Nintendo realizes what a dangerous position they're in. Nintendo NEVER sells hardware at a loss. Ever. They even turned a profit on the Gamecube.

You can read this one of two ways.

1) Nintendo saw that the 3DS wasn't selling and games were getting cancelled and made a panic move. They're slashing the price and hoping that people buy it, and if they don't they're screwed.

2) Nintendo saw that the 3DS wasn't selling and identified one of the core issues with the system. They had two choices: Incremental price drops over a period of a year or so that would lead people to REALLY wonder what was wrong with the 3DS or one MAJOR price cut that would make people worry about it once and then stop worrying.

Either way you look at it, Nintendo feels that they're in a desperate position. They usually know what they're doing, but this seems really early in the 3DS' life to pull a Hail Mary like this.

Look, I love my 3DS as a piece of hardware. The 3D effect is awesome. I haven't had any battery life problems. The eShop is good, despite what some might say. My main problem is that there are no games yet. This is directly tied to the price issues.

Nintendo knows that as long as the price is high, there will be no adopters. No adopters means companies won't make games, meaning fewer adopters. Nintendo has decided to try to break the cycle the only way they can. Don't get me wrong, it's still a little nerve-wracking, but their reasoning at least makes sense.

So, there are a few ways this can go.

1) Nintendo sells a crazy amount of units, early adopters are appeased, developers go crazy and throw out their Vita dev kits. The cost of making the 3DS goes down to the point where Nintendo is making money again. Everyone is happy everywhere. A thousand years of peace cover the globe.

2) The 3DS sales spike. Early adopters are a little cheesed off, but the games coming down the pike help keep them from burning down Nintendo's headquarters. Developers start coming back tentatively.

3) The PS Vita eats the 3DS for lunch. Early adopters burn their systems in the street and murder Reggie Fils-Amie with pitchforks. Developers wear sackcloth and sing dirges about Nintendo's corpse.

Of these scenarios, result number two is the most likely. At this point, we have to downgrade the 3DS' ceiling from "DS/GBA level success" to "reasonably decent sales." Time will tell.

I'm On Twitter Now

I'm on Twitter now as EelSnave. Follow me! I command it.

Why Is Mega Man Dying?

With the recent cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3, there's a lot of hand-wringing among fans of the Blue Bomber. The last two games in the series, including the odd Mega Man Universe, have been cancelled. Previous entries in the series haven't sold a lot of copies either. What's happened to Mega Man?
First, a little history. In the NES days, there were a few major franchises for Nintendo systems. Mario games were obviously big. Zelda was huge, although not exploited as often as Mario games. Dragon Quest was massive in Japan. The other major tentpole franchise was Mega Man.

It can't be overstated how cool Mega Man was back in the day. Here was a game where you could take on any level you wanted at any time. There was technically only one or two orders you could beat the levels in, but still, it was the illusion of an open world that was so shocking. Most console gamers were so used to linearity in platformers that it was mind-blowing to have a game that gave us the choice of going wherever we wanted right off the bat.

The music was also key. Most game music to that point wasn't really meant to get you moving in your chair to the beat. Mega Man games changed all that with songs that had a cool beat and catchy hooks. After designers realized that you could use scratch noises and static to approximate drums and cymbals like the designers of Mega Man did, all bets were off.

Mega Man games were challenging, although not unfair (unless we include the original Mega Man game). The level design was top-notch, too. Mega Man had everything you would look for in a great series of games.

So what happened to Mega Man? Why is it so hard to see a good Mega Man game these days? We'll examine three reasons.

1) Sequel Fatigue.

We've talked about sequel fatigue before regarding Sega's games and Activision's mismanagement of the Guitar Hero brand, but Mega Man is actually in WORSE shape.

To prove our point, let's open up with Mario. Mario is kind of a whore, so we should see a lot of Mario games in his history, stretching back to 1984 when Mario Bros. first launched, right?

4 - NES (Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 1-3)
3 - Game Boy (Super Mario Land 1-3)
2 - SNES (Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island)
1 - N64 (Super Mario 64)
1 - Gamecube (Super Mario Sunshine)
1 - DS (New Super Mario Bros.)
3 - Wii (Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii)

15 games in 26 years. That's it. That's less than 1 game per year in the main series. I could see an argument made for including the Super Mario Advance series or Super Mario Deluxe in that list, but even if we do that we only have 20 games total. We're still sitting at less than 1 game per year, and that's including remakes.

Now, here's a list of only the action games in the various Mega Man series.

6 - NES (Mega Man 1-6)
4 - SNES (Mega Man 7, X1-3)
5 - Game Boy (Mega Man I-V)
2 - Game Boy Color (Xtreme 1 & 2)
6 - Playstation (Mega Man 8, X4-6, Legends 1 & 2)
5 - Game Boy Advance (Zero 1-4, Mega Man & Bass)
2 - Playstation 2 (X7 & 8)
2 - DS (ZX & Advent)
2 - Downloadable (Mega Man 9, 10)

That's 34 games in 24 years that are JUST action games. That's a lot of games. That's more than one Mega Man game in a year. I left out Mega Man Powered Up! for the PSP and some of the other side games just because I didn't want to be here all week counting them, but there are more out there.

We're not even counting RPGs yet. Do you realize they've made 11 Mega Man RPGs since 2001? Once again, that's more than one per year! By comparison, there are only 7 Mario RPGs since 1996. That's about one every two years.

See? Capcom killed Mega Man by spamming him all over the place. After a while, you start to get diminishing returns.

2) Diminishing Returns.

You'll always have your die-hard fans that insist that Mega Man is still just as good as he ever was, but for those of us who live in the real world, there is a very clear downward trajectory with the Mega Man series.

Quick, name the best Mega Man game in the main series! You probably spat out Mega Man 2 or 3. That's not to say that 4 or 5 weren't good, but 2 and 3 were just that much better. Now, if someone told you that Mega Man 8 is the best Mega Man game, you would roll your eyes and groan. It's not the best by a long shot. The voices are weird. The level design isn't that great. The weapons are dull. The bosses are forgettable.

OK, now which is the best game in the Mega Man X series. You probably said X1 or X2. Why? The bosses were memorable. The weapons were cool. The level design was tight. X3 is OK, but not great. X4 is really neat, but it's not as good as X1 or 2.

It's clear that they started running out of ideas. To prove it, which bosses are more memorable: The bosses in Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 6? What about Mega Man X versus Mega Man X8? Which weapons do you remember more?

Good ideas take time to gestate. You need time to trim the fat off of a good idea. You need time to build on a good foundation. When you crank out sequel after sequel in such a short period of time, you don't give good ideas time to breathe.

So what's happened? Because of the excessive sequel diarrhea that Capcom has fostered, the newer games (9 and 10 aside, mostly) haven't been as good. Therefore, Mega Man no longer carries the cachet he once did. It's no longer a guarantee that a Mega Man game is going to sell. It's a riskier investment.

If you are Capcom and you know that Mega Man isn't going to sell very well because you've mismanaged the franchise, why would you keep greenlighting Mega Man games? It's especially true of weird experiments like Mega Man Universe or continuations of series that only a small crowd liked, such as Mega Man Legends 3. Why pour resources into games that won't sell?

3) No Mega Man.

If someone buys a Sonic game, they expect to play as Sonic. If you buy a Mario game, you expect to play as Mario. If you're not able to, you say that the game misrepresented itself.

With that in mind, name the hero of Mega Man Network Transmission. Now Battle Network. Now ZX Advent. If you were able to do that, congratulations. You're better at this than I am.

The most recent Mega Man games have been doing just that. They've been expecting that people will willingly play as different characters other than the name on the box. That's insanity. When I pick up a Mega Man game, I want to play as Mega Man.

That's not taking anything away from the Mega Man Zero series, which is a fine series. But even that series didn't sell very well and started getting low marks towards the end of its lifespan. The point still stands: If you're going to make a Mega Man game, make a Mega Man game. If you don't want to make a Mega Man game, then don't slap "Mega Man" on the cover in big, bold letters. You're only diluting the brand name.

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So, can Mega Man come back from the dead? What does Capcom need to do to revive interest? We'll cover that in a different article.

The 3DS Virtual Console: Not Very Good?

The Virtual Console on the 3DS is now in full force. It's exciting to be able to play some of these old games again, like Donkey Kong '94 and Zelda: Link's Awakening. However, here's the problem a lot of people are going to find rather quickly:

A lot of the games released for early portable systems kind of suck.

First of all, let it be known I'm not knocking Donkey Kong '94 or Zelda: Link's Awakening. I'm also not saying that all Game Boy games suck.

However, let's be objective about the major releases that are already on the Virtual Console. Super Mario Land is merely OK. Mario is too small and it's too easy to misjudge a jump onto an enemy. It also ends too quickly. Kirby's Dream Land, while fun, is only a half an hour long with little to no reason to keep playing through it.

In fact, if you take off the nostalgia blinders, you're left with very few good early portable games. Are there a few? Yes. We've mentioned all of them we could think of and came up with 20. That's it. Throw in the Game Boy Color and you have another 5-10 decent games. That's slightly over 25 games for the entire Virtual Console.

"But... what about the Game Gear?" Yeah, what about it? Name me 10 good games from the Game Gear.

(Jeopardy theme)

Now remove all games that say "Sonic" in the title and try again.

(Jeopardy theme ad infinitum)

That's the problem. If people are complaining about early Virtual Console releases not being as exciting as they would have hoped, get used to it. There just simply weren't a lot of good games for the Game Boy.

The Game Boy didn't live or die on its library. It survived because it was a portable video game system at a time when the only portable video game systems were LCD games. The battery life was great too. That was really it. Most of the games that came out for the Game Boy fell in to two categories: Lackluster ports of big-console games and odd experiments thrown onto the Game Boy because there was more room for innovation.

On the 3DS Virtual Console, both of those advantages have been obliterated. For example, what kind of portable gaming systems are out now? There's the DS, the 3DS, the PSP and the upcoming Vita, not to mention iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Almost all of them have reasonable battery life, and the ones that don't make up for it in other areas.

That means that the Game Boy now has to stand solely on the merits of its library, and with the library being what it is, that's not going to be very kind to our green-screened little friend.

Another big thing that made the Game Boy so great at the time is that our expectations were so low. We were so used to crappy handheld video game systems that we couldn't believe what we were able to do on the Game Boy. Whereas before, we had cheap Tiger LCD games (look it up, kids), now we were able to play real actual games. When I first made Mario do a spin-jump in Super Mario Land 2, it was amazing. I didn't think they could do that on a Game Boy game, and it felt like I had Super Mario World in my hands, albeit a monochromatic one.

However, at this point we're pretty spoiled now. With the Game Boy Advance and later with the DS, we've gotten some pretty deep experiences on portable systems. We're not seeing as many lazy ports, but instead a lot of full-featured experiences designed for the ground up for handhelds. What we're used to playing now on a handheld console doesn't even come close to comparing what we used to have to play.

I'm not knocking the Game Boy at all, mind you. I had a Game Boy for years and had some great moments with it. Link's Awakening was the first game I played with a real story in it, and I remember being shocked that video game could stir my emotions. I played the crap out of Pokemon Red. I played every RPG I could get my hands on and very nearly beat Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. That final boss was a MONSTER.

And, to be fair, there were some pretty innovative titles for the Game Boy. Case in point:

• Wario Land II. When Wario Land II came out, some of the earliest reviews were saying that it was too easy. Why? Because Wario couldn't die. You could only get knocked back and lose coins. It's not a shocking concept anymore, but at the time it was not appreciated, so it got some mediocre reviews for precisely that reason.
• Pokemon. Would Pokemon have worked on any other system than the Game Boy? I think we can say "no," because Pokemon games haven't worked on any big-console systems and won't ever work on them. Community is a big part of Pokemon, and that's what Nintendo understood when they launched Pokemon on the most portable system they had.

But when we start talking about the strength of the 3DS Virtual Console, don't be surprised if it comes up wanting. When we take the nostalgia blinders off, it's plain to see that the Game Boy's library wasn't very top-notch to begin with. Playing the 3DS Virtual Console means accepting a very specific time in gaming's history, warts and all.

What Do You Need For A Good TV Serial?

Lost was one of the biggest, most influential series in recent memory. It resonated with audiences and kept them guessing to the end. There was so much buzz around it and the ratings were so good that everyone thereafter wanted to copy its template. There were a pile of dramas afterwards that could be called "Lost, But With A Difference."

For instance:

• The Nine (Lost during a bank heist)
• The Event (Lost with some...event)
• Jericho (Lost after a nuclear explosion)
• V (Lost with extraterrestrials)
• Heroes (Lost with superheroes)
• FlashForward (Lost with a timetraveling conspiracy)
• DayBreak (Lost + Groundhog Day + MURDER)

Each show tried (or is trying) copying the supposed template: 1) Important event happens. 2) Characters try piecing together the mystery of what happened and why. The most successful one of these, at least in terms of audience size, was Heroes. We're going to tackle the rise and fall of Heroes in a later article, but for a brief, shining moment, they were oh-so-close to capturing the audience of Lost. Even that show fell apart, and most of the other shows are either fading, faded, or completely forgotten. Why? What happened?

We're going to use the notoriously bad movie Delgo as a clue. Delgo had a budget of $40 million and ended up grossing about $700,000. One of the reasons for it? Delgo opened with a long, boring explanation of the mythology of the world. Here's a quote from Nathan Rabin from AVClub:

You see, once upon a time in a land called Jhamora there lived a bunch of slithery lizard-people known as the Lokni. A loss of natural resources forced a bunch of dragonflies known as the Nohrin to settle on Jhamora with the permission of the Lokni. Alas, Sedessa (voiced by Anne Bancroft), the power-mad sister of Nohrin king King Zahn (voiced by Louis Gossett Jr., the young people’s favorite) decides to terrorize the Lokni out of a sense of racial superiority. In the process she and her goons murder the father (Burt Reynolds) of the titular young Lokni boy-lizard (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.). Meanwhile, Sedessa is stripped of her wings and banished from the kingdom of the Nhorin as punishment for her brutality. Fifteen years later, Sedessa forms a strategic alliance with a race of ogre people and conspires with one General Raius to exacerbate tensions between the Lokni and Nhorin people so war will break out and she can seize power.

OK, got all that? Rabin points out that Delgo assumes the battle is already won, so it has no problem dumping mythology on you without letting you know the characters. It gives you this plot diarrhea before telling you why you should even care.

That's what happens with some of these shows. Their primary concern is the mythology. They care so much about the world that they don't focus on why we these characters are worth caring about, and in turn, why we should keep watching.

Consider how Lost began. The first episode introduced the characters, the monster, then the creepy French radio message. The first season led us into the characters' lives and what decisions brought them to this point. Then and only then did they start deepening the mythology with the hatch, the Dharma Initiative, and all the other crazy stuff that they got into. For as crazy as Lost got in latter years, throughout the first season the show started out simple: People crash-land on an island that's more than what it seems, and they have to figure out how to survive there.

Because the set up was so simple, we could focus on getting to know the characters. It helped that the characters on Lost were so strong and nuanced that we cared about them and wanted to know more. Sawyer was an interesting character, for example. He was a charming rogue who didn't care about anyone, but he was also a victim with a scarred soul. Locke was a character who seemed like a rough, Special-Ops type of guy. It turned out he was a crippled, broken man who was living out the fantasy of being a tough guy. These are interesting characters who had goals and just so happened to be thrown into this situation together. If they never would have crashed on the island, you can easily envision what their lives would have been like.

Granted, Lost had the advantage of great ratings and a huge budget, so they could continue delving into their mythology. That being said, most successful serials follow the same template. Look at Battlestar Galactica, for example. BSG's first season is all about a simple concept: People on the run from robots bent on their destruction. Afterwards we started getting in to all of the other craziness, but not until we learned about the characters, like Starbuck, Tigh, and Adama.

We can see, therefore, that a high-concept show can't be too high-concept too soon. The most successful of these shows start with a simple concept and then deepens the concept over time. Why is that?

Let’s use an example of something unrelated to TV: Facebook. Your grandma can look at Facebook and understand it immediately. People who she knows will post about what they're doing. There's a big box at the type that you can type things in. You type in something and hit "Share," and it appears immediately. It's so easy to use that anyone can do it.

Can you do deeper things with it? Absolutely. You can share videos, post pictures, play games, list your favorite TV shows and get updates about them. You can create an ad and put it on the site if you want to. However, they don't splay all that in front of a first-time user. For a first-time user, they give you one message: How are you feeling? Share it!

That's what a high-concept show needs to be about. One of the deepest, most high-concept shows in history, The Prisoner, starts simply. A former spy is on an island. They're trying to break him, and he refuses. He tries to run away and gets caught. Using that basic template, The Prisoner was able to explore issues of identity, collectivism, Orwell, and others, but it all started out simple.

Let's run some comparisons. These are simple setups:

• Lost: A group of people crash land on an island and have to survive.
• Battlestar Galactica: A group of people are all that's left of humanity and have to survive.
• Heroes: A group of people get superpowers.
• Jericho: A group of people are survivors of a nuclear attack.
• The Walking Dead: A group of people are survivors of a zombie apocalypse.

Compare that with other setups:

• FlashForward: Everyone on earth sees two minutes of their future from six months down the line.
• DayBreak: A man is framed for murder and sees his girlfriend die and is forced to relive the day over and over again until he solves the murder and saves his girlfriend.
• V: Aliens come to Earth and claim to come in peace, but it's discovered that they're reptiles with more sinister objectives. (Admittedly, this is the same setup as the more successful 1983 miniseries, but the point still stands.)

Which setups are easier to understand and follow? Which shows were more successful? Sure, some of the aforementioned shows didn’t have very long runs, but they’re remembered as being GOOD. You’ll also notice that the “good” shows have premises that being with “a group of people,” as opposed to “something happens.”

That leads us to the next point: Once you have a simple setup, then it's time to set your characters in motion. Who are they? What kind of people are they? What were they doing with their lives before the show started?

This is the step that a lot of shows fumble. For example, Heroes was a great show for the first season when the characters had very clearly defined goals. Peter Petrelli wanted to be somebody, Hiro wanted to be a great hero, even stripper lady wanted to put aside her past and be a good mother. However, after that great first season, the characters went off the rails and did things that didn't make sense. It's no surprise that the show's ratings start plummeting when the characters fell apart.

You can sometimes pull out a great show with a complex premise and great characters. Farscape is an example. The setup? An astronaut is sucked through a wormhole and ends up with a group of people on the run. It's not the easiest setup to wrap your head around. However, because what followed was good, it made it easier to keep up.

However, the point remains that a complex premise is just plain offputting for most viewers. You could say that "audiences just shouldn't be so dumb and maybe they’ll understand something complex," but that's not fair. Some of the best movies, books and TV shows start with a simple premise:

• Catcher In The Rye: A troubled youth runs away from home.
• Star Wars: A young man discovers a mysterious power inside of him.
• Catch-22: A soldier discovers the insanity of war.
• Citizen Kane: The rise and fall of a newspaper mogul.
• Singin' In The Rain: A silent movie star tries to make a talking picture.
• To Kill A Mockingbird: A girl comes of age and sees racism in her hometown.

From those simple premises, they're able to build and weave intricate stories with deep and interesting themes.

Am I saying that all entertainment needs to be simplistic? Well, no. I'm just saying that for a complex serial mystery that attempts to emulate Lost, it's important not to get bogged down in mythology. A simple premise that deepens later on along with great characters is all you need to make a great show.