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The Ugly, Dirty Story of Making a Game
Via the ffwd linklog, a series of Edge Magazine developer diaries reprinted on the web by the folks who wrote them. Ninja Theory has been making the next-gen game Heavenly Sword for quite a while now. They've told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the process of making the game, wrangling a publisher, and getting the game to market. From the intro article: "What our research does show is that 3rd person action adventures are big but the first generation games in this genre are always shit. Nina, Mike and I originally came from Sony Cambridge, a studio that specialised in 3rd person action games and so we would be treading familiar ground. If we start now, a full year or two before most developers even think about next-gen development, we would have the time to craft a great game and release it early in the next-gen console cycle. Perhaps we could pull off a Halo."
This has been the first thing I've turned to in Edge magazine for the last few months. Fascinating stuff.
My Journal
Yeah, yeah. Great reading. Inspirational stuff. I laughed, I cried, I cursed the short-sighted publishers who dragged them along until the uplifting conclusion.
But the game sounds absolutely incredible. These bastards are why I got an XBox (why are you looking at me like that? _I_ liked Kung Fu Chaos, I don't care what you thought of it), and now that I've seen the Heavenly Sword screenshots I know I'll be in line for the PS3.
Complete and utter bastards, the lot of them.
Wow, this was really fun and interesting to read, I really recommend you to start reading if you havent done so yet.
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:)i es/ken/kens_photo.jpg
There's no "Next" link at part 8, but part 9 (last part) is also online:
http://www.ninjatheory.com/blinkblink/index.php?o
And a little bit offtopic, but Nina looks hot!
http://www.ninjatheory.com/blinkblink/images/stor
(from left to right: Tameem, Mike, Ken Kutaragi, Nina)
UK game companies, or more specifically game programmers from the UK, have a long and proud tradition of coding very fine games indeed. At the top of my list of games designers is Julian Gollop, creator of Rebelstar Raiders, Chaos, Laser Squad and the UFO series of games (another one due out soon, IIRC).
The secret of good games design is not in making them pretty, or sound nice, or have wazzy graphics, or new gaming engines, or beautifully rendered FMV sequences - that's all window dressing. The real secret is producing good gameplay; the common denominator between most of the best computer games designers is that they learnt their trade on the likes of Acorns, Commodore 64s, ZX80s & 81s, ZX Spectrums and the like, where available memory (which gets sucked up big time by lush graphics and sound like no-one's business) was scarce to say the least, so the majority of the effort went into making sure than the gameplay kicked ass, took names, was compulsively addictive and generally rocked. That's not to say that turkeys didn't get made either, but with so little memory to go around, such platforms were a lot less forgiving of sloppy programming than current ones are and so gameplay could be wildly affected by how well a game was coded.
If only games would remember this rule more often: gameplay first, everything else second; window dressing is nice if done well, but won't save a game that blows goats. :p
Ceci n'est pas une
Except Halo was aimlessly redesigned several times while it was in development on the PC. It was only the 9 month deadline imposed when MS bought Bungee that the Xbox Halo took shape. Hardly the best example to choose when talking about starting early on a game to maximise its quality. Perhaps Mario 64 would be the best example? It allegedly held up the launch of the N64 while Nintendo tweaked it.