Easy as Advanced Algorithms |
| Written by bryan | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 20 December 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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As a kid, I used to dream of making my own video game. I remember at one point I grabbed my tiny notebook and started writing down my ideas. When I was finished, I kicked back on my beanbag with a satisfied grin on my face thinking that somehow, one day, it would actually all come together. I suppose as a kid I had a problem with mixing reality with wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur. 10 years later, here I am sitting behind my computer typing about my lethargic pursuit. My dusty notebook lost, probably tucked away somewhere underneath an old cartridge of Duck Hunt. I think it all abruptly stopped when I found out I wasn’t smart enough to figure out what the hell a preprocessor was. Marko Diekman - Producer, Face of Mankind "Rebirth":  "Well, we started development back in 2001 and "finished" in 2006 when wereleased Face of Mankind commercially. I'd also like to add that an MMO is never really finished, and at that point FoM definitely wasn't. The biggest struggle was to survive this long development period without any income whatsoever. The financial struggle has always been the worst. It hung like a sword above our heads, always ready to fall down and destroy everything we've built up. It's also very difficult to find the right compromise between the time and resources you have available and the quality of your work. You just can't do everything as professionally as Blizzard can. Once you understand this, there's actually a good chance you might bring your development to an end, what we luckily achieved. Many independent MMO developers don't even reach beta, not to speak of retail. That would be my tip for other studios. Be aware of your limitations. Besides the organizational and financial struggles, there are, of course, technical difficulties as well. An MMO is the most complex, hard to craft, painful piece of game software. Where normal games end, problems just begin with MMOs. Technically it was very difficult to implement the rather unique game design of Face of Mankind. It had to be extremely "free" when it comes to player choices, promote true ongoing role-play. To boot, the fighting part was never supposed to become minor.  The most often revised feature was our mission system, which was a real painto get right. And to be honest, it never did. It started as a very open, completely player-made system where players even reviewed and evaluated the mission result. The problem with that system was that there were no game mechanics in place to evaluate the actions of the mission team, and for a game to be fun you need such mechanics. There must be some features for players to see how well they are doing. The mission system went through some revisions and ended in a completely modular mission objective type design. Players were able to put together the mission they wanted by adding freely editable objectives based on measurable mission events. To bring this story to an end, it ended with a compromise we had to do for balancing reasons. Anyway, we've learned from our mistakes and are now trying to do it right with Face of Mankind: Rebirth. It won't be perfect, but an evolutionary step in the right direction. :-) " "StateofShock" - Developer, Lost Colony "When you have a company, such as Microsoft, that basically runs the desktop industry, our schedule can face setbacks based on that one single company. For instance, we were all set for Vista and with DirectX 10 support, but that changed when most of our gamers made the switch back to XP using DirectX 9.0c due to Vista problems.  The future is DirectX 10, but this recent setback isn't good for theindustry. We have to rely on what Microsoft and/or Apple does. Support for Mac has been easy, especially with the new Leopard OS X. We haven't seen the amount of problems with Mac as we do with Microsoft. Another problem we faced was game engine support. We usually find the bugs first and report them to the company that made the game engine. Unfortunately, they are slow on resolving these critical bugs. They are proactive, but very slow on updates. This is frustrating because our game relies on the engine as much as it relies on the OS maker (Microsoft). On average, it usually takes 3 to 6 months for the game engine company to roll out an update that might fix 2 problems. By then, we already fixed and developed a solution ourselves and have moved on to new bugs. So far to date (for the past year), we found and fixed 48 bugs with the game engine. This is frustrating because it put us one year behind schedule for "Lost Colony." While this is all a struggle, we as developers try to view as "challenges" so we can overlook the frustrations. It's very important for us to keep our motivation topped at all times. If we view these struggles as "challenges", then we are actually making a better game with better bug-fixing solutions."
I guess if we were to sum it all up, juggling between compromise and keeping a game current seem to be some of the top problems in independent development. As I mentioned, this is only skimming the surface of a few problems these guys face on a daily basis. So the next time you feel like pursuing game development take a second to think "Am I able to spend countless hours without income, just to fall into a pit of bugs, troubleshooting , and endless development?". If the answer is yes, than my next question is "Are you a sentient being, or a cyborg?"
            
Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved. |
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, this article illuminates a lot of spots that were missing about game developing difficulties .
That's what these guys get for not getting sponsorship
. Sorry about that.| Next > |
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