Myst IV Postmortem

Gamasutra.com is hosting an analysis of Myst IV: Revelation. The author explores the good and bad points of the game's production, and reveals interesting moments from the development process. From the article: "Less than a year before the end of the project, things were not going well on the Myst IV: Revelation team: no single zone was in a finished state, communication was difficult between team members and puzzles were taking too long to prototype. We looked at the quantity of work remaining and started brainstorming on how to close this project before the end of September."

Comments

Understandable

[Jorkapp]

It seems Ubi learned a hard lesson through the school of hard knocks. As a game developer myself I can actually say "More often than not, adding alot of man power to a project will only make it alot worse."

The new entries will be plagued by confusion with what is already created and how to create new things. This confusion will result in the already-there workers having to explain and document everything to them, and results in a huge slow-down on the project.

Their "SWAT Team" idea was really nice though. I should think of that next time I get some additional people to work on a project.