When Game Development Goes Bad

Thanks to Boomtown for its article discussing an insight into the failure of a game developer, in this case developer Escape Factory. The post-mortem styled interview touches on problems with engine licensing ("We had no PS2 experience whatsoever, which is why we chose to use the Unreal engine, lured by its promise of PS2 compatibility. Unfortunately, that compatibility ended later in the process"), as well as how developers present themselves to publishers ("We thought it was all about making the best game in the world, but in reality it's all about making your publisher think you're making the best game in the world") - there's more information in a post-mortem Powerpoint presentation at Escape Factory's official site.

Comments

Re:Data East's Tattoo Assassins

[secolactico]

For more info you can go here.

Here's Bob Gale IMDB page. IMHO, other than Back to the Future, he has only flops to his credits. "Bordello of Blood"?? Crappy even by Tales of the Crypt standards (and I did like Demon Knight).

Not to feed the troll, but he is modded 5

[cgenman]

"These buffoons" made decisions that seem perfectly rational at the time but in retrospect are a bad idea. Cutting their unique feature is always a bad idea, but when you're coming up significantly short on the funding end, that unique feature probably represented 1/4th of the budget. They chose to focus on developing the character that needed the most work, rather than working on the character that was OK. The publisher made the switch to the PS2, which supports with the cutting of co-op play. Using a licensed engine is a very reasonable thing to do usually, especially if you have no experience on that platform. Not continuing with the prototype is completely understandable if you are making your "first and greatest" game. You don't want the baggage of your prototype and hey, you licensed an engine for a reason, right? Nobody likes firing people, even if they are bringing the team down. And many people underestimate the publisher's role in development.

In other words, they did not make any uncomprehensible mistakes, and they didn't make any mistakes that haven't been made many times before in.

BTW, 600k will get you two coders and a office. How will you pay the artists? Designers? Testers? Mo-cap? Voice actors? Texturers? Administrators? Musicians? It makes me cry how much people with no connection to the industry underestimate the development process. "Just make it great." "What, really, makes a game great?" "You know, not bad stuff." And then they go on to quote some price and team size that might get them Prince of Persia 1, not the 275 people who worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the 230 people who worked on Halo.

600k is so low as to be downright insulting. What do you think we do all day? Play tetris? Why do you think we accept salaries of half of what we could earn elsewhere, doing twice the work?

Re:The article speaks for itself...

[daVinci1980]

You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.

Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.

There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:

1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).

2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.

You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.

You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.