What does it take?

The first exposure many of you had to my current project was when this news came out. (Wow.. 2006.. has it been that long?) As we've mentioned before, the project was in development for some time before that date for prototyping. In truth, development on this project has been brewing since as early as 2004 with prototype teams and proof of concept that we could pull off a great RTS on the console. But as many of you know, what's required in this industry are results; Shipping your game. I think our relative release date has been mentioned, although for sake of CYA, I won't mention it here, but rather suggest that you will be able to purchase this product sometime this year. So on the verge of realizing a 4 year vision, I've been looking really hard lately about what it takes to actually get your product out the door.

I'll be blunt : Video game development is fucking psychotic. And anyone who's involved with it needs to be a tad bit screwed up in the brain to make it through at a professional level.


I've mentioned before that this industry may not be stocked with the most technical people, yet at the core, we're developing a product in a super technical environment. This causes large swings in impact of decisions over the lifetime of the project. Technical and tool chain decisions made at the very beginning of the project often butt heads with fast-and-hard crunch and final push development at the end of the project. So in reality, our job as programmers is almost to act as oracles into the future of the life cycle of the project. In truth, we can't trust our users, ( which is a concept that I naively ignored when starting this project and has come full circle to bite me in the lower parts of my ass.) so we really can't rely on what they are telling us they 'want' out of the future of their development environment.

I can personally vouch for the fact that too much freedom with content developers is asking for death and confusion in your product. Which, if you listen to them, is the only thing that they dream about at night or when they are alone in the shower. Actions show, however, that more freedom requires more technical understanding of the authoring process, which requires more frontal-lobe-power-per-minute in order to complete their jobs, and that's not always available , or the best idea. I've been impressed before by low-tech solutions to engine systems that have amazing art results and visual, and have come to the conclusion that the reason for visual success in these realms, is not due to feature availability, but LACK of features that force content creators to explore the entire expanse of potential within their constraints.

So when your final 15-month crunch starts before ship, the ability to finish the project relies on the fact that your tool chain is simple enough that low-frontal-lobe-horsepower people can make art, and not screw things up / break the entire pipeline.

That being said, I believe there's some confusion at a great deal of companies about what it takes to get that last 100meters out of the game. Recent GDC talks from Blizzard suggest that they have an 'All hands' approach to a shipping title, in that when the cowbell rings, everyone gets behind the shipping cow, and pushes it over the line, as though it were incapable of doing so on it's own like some 50 ton Banana slug. Within 15 mintues of that news hitting, e-mail threads started like wildfire supporting this idea. "Woah" I replied, "If we can't finish the final 10% this product without the entirety of the rest studio helping us, why wait until the final RTM crunch? Why not bring everyone on board NOW so that we release a MUCH more polished product, rather than something with 'less bugs' ?"

Crickets.

Which goes to prove my next point: It takes heart to ship a game.

To elaborate, it takes the attachment to stay focused and productive when you're not crunching for a beta, or a milestone, or RTM. It takes dedication to keep making progress even when the game isn't sexy (yet), and be committed to it long before the shit-just-hit-the-fan crunch.

Game studios that adopt to the 'all hands before ship' approach to things are in my opinion, just patching up problems from the entire dev cycle, and fooling themselves into thinking that adding 200 chefs into the already packed kitchen will really make a massive difference in the short term. More importantly, they are fooling themselves by putting people on the project, during the most crutial time of the project, whom don't have the heart for it. These people are usually working on other projects, their projects, and getting sucked into your project is, at even an unconcous level, pretty fucking annoying.

If you're going to need the help at the end, just bring them on earlier. Let them get attached to the product, let them take vestment in the decisions. Let them give a damn about what's rolling out the door.

Because we're all aware, nothing hurts your heart for your project than A never ending crunch.

Which, unfortunitally, is what most people think is what it REALLY takes to ship a game......

~Main