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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."
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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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