Slashdot Mirror
How Not To Make An MMOG
garylian writes "Some of the folks here might remember a Massive game called 'Mourning' that went into development and never really went anywhere. Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete. Some former fans have a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Highlights from the article include the fact that one of the game backers was a internet porn-lord!" From the article:"The game was going nowhere, no one really believed in its success. We all knew it was going to fail, but we were kind of reluctant in admiting it. Those who realized this and had better opportunities, left. Those who were blinded by different reasons or had no other choices, remained till the end (or maybe had different reasons.) It's not that we didn't try to change this direction the game was heading to... We did, but no one was listening to us. " The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt.
The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt
It's on Slashdot. That means we should take it with an entire salt mine, not just a grain!
How is that any different than Wikipedia?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
i hope this wasn't one of the games one of my IRC friends was working on... paco? you behind this disastor? X)
Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete.
Which makes it different from other MMORPGs... how?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Is it just me, or does the whole Q/A session seem like a personal attack by either a very informed player, or by somebody who used to work at the company.
Although character assination can (some times) be a just about acceptable thing, the whole interview seems to be going a little bit too far.
I'm sure they'll work out how this guy is, and we'll have another (possibly fake) interview up on slashdot in the next couple of days saying the exact opposite.. So remember kids, if you try and screw people, their going to screw you twice as hard :D
Just my £0.02p :)
Summary, we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Do you mean Ron Jeremy?
No sig for now.
But that's what made it such an interesting read. It almost reads well enough to be fiction. You come away from it with a good sense of the main players (Dave, Ego, Ado) and can identify those people with others you may know. And Ado getting punched in the face.... he so had that coming.
Questions seemeed to go in circles, but it was an amusing read, especially for those with appreciation for software and especially game development.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Movie scripts are released all the time. I'd love to see a good complete game design doc and then compare it with the completed game.
look on gamedev.net's articles section - the full doom design doc is there, among many others.
the design doc is a highly overrated concept that is too often assumed to be a 5000 page bible written by a team of monkeys before the game's production.
the reality is that the design document is a living document that, while necessary, will inevitably change & morph as the project progresses.
what IS crucial to a project is a set of key design 'rules' tenets that must be used while assessing new features that are to be added to a project. the implementation details are often better left to the experts (ie the actual artists, scripters or programmers developing the game).
so many of my game design students think that they need to write 200 page design docs before they do any other work on a project. such a waste of time.
Gekido's Lair
I find this interesting... would you care to elaborate?
I don't have any game development experience, and only a couple of years of programming experience in a business environment. I have found that projects with a solid set of documentation - be it a requirements doc, or use cases, or anything that maps out in detail what the finished product should accomplish, and which I'm assuming is roughly equivalent to a game design doc - were much more pleasant and easier to work on. It's not the existance of the documents themselves that I want - by the end they're probably 60% inaccurate anyway. It's the fact that at the very beginning of the project someone sat down and came up with a DETAILED vision of what the end product should be like, thinking through a lot of the details, anticipating possible development problems and solving them at design time. The result (given reasonable time and resources - not always a valid assumption) is a good product at design time, which gets refined during development, ending up with a very good or excellent product at release. The alternative - for projects that don't devote as much time to requirements, design doc, etc. - being a bad to mediocre product at design time due to vagueness or too many gaps, which results in a mediocre or (at best) good product after the refinements during development.
I fully agree that the design doc is a living document. I can also see the value in having good rules for adding/dropping features. Implementation details generally don't belong in this type of document. What I don't understand (and since "many of my game design students" seems to imply you have much more experience in the field than me, I hope you can elaborate on) is why you say the design doc is highly overrated, and why writing a 200 page design doc before you start working on the project is a waste of time.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
I'm taking the interview with a pinch of salt, as advised.
However, there is a general principle worth noting here which the article illustrates very well regardless of the veracity of the interview. A game designer who doesn't speak the language of the developers cannot possibly control the product being developed without creating a static definition of some kind.
This definition doesn't necessarily have to be a document (for example, for defining quests it could be through a simple interactive state machine app), but it has to be something concrete and stable which the developers can chew around. The reason for this is simple. The chewing around bridges the communications gap to the tech-illiterate designer, creating another layer of definition (an interpretation) as to what is really being requested. The developers then work to this extended definition.
That the designer allegedly wanted to write nothing down and also suffered memory loss of what he requested is so totally ridiculous that it sounds like a fabrication to me. After all, people can always take notes in meetings with which to substantiate their work, and there's a great little gizmo called a dictaphone which is hard to refute. So, something doesn't smell right there.
That said, it was the role of the lead developer or team leader to create the actual dev spec for his team to implement, taking it back to the designer for approval before any system building is begun. If the designer refuses to sign it off or cooperate in refining it "because this must not be written down", fine, nothing gets done.
You can't make something if you don't know what it is you are supposed to be making.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It was also a bad sign that the programmers (game designers) were not allowed to talk to the customers (fanbase). While of course there has to be a limit on everything, a certain amount of customer/programmer interaction is important to developing a project that pleases the customer, rather than the designer.
As another poster has pointed out programmers are not game designers. In other words programmers implement the game designer's ideas. The game designer should do research, or have research done for him/her. Nowhere does this indicate that programmers should interact with customers. As a programmer myself I can see what a recipe for disaster that can be.
As for your theory that programmer interaction is part of the formula for success I have a counter example: World of Warcraft. How much interaction did the customers/fans have with programmers prior to BlizzCon (a year after release?)?
As the GP was pointing out success has more to do with a plan. Good plans usually have someone other than programmers interacting with customers/fans during development. As a geek it took a while to realize this but sales, maketing, and public relations people exist for a reason. Business is a Darwinian process. If PR specialists did not help companies communicate more effectively than geeks then PR specialists would not have lasted this long. If marketing specialists (not a spin person - a create an experiment to validate designer's idea, conduct focus group, etc person) did not help companies design more desirable products than geeks then marketing specialists would not have lasted this long.
Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game".
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Fenrir. Seems to toot his horn a lot.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be.
... blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job.
I did not express myself clearly. When I wrote that programmers implement the designer's ideas I did not mean to imply that they (we) should have no feedback, suggestions, or other involvement. What I was really trying to say is that they (we) should have no direct interaction with customers. I agree programmers are an important part of the internal development process, but they are generally a poor choice for spanning the boundary between the company and the public.
Not blinded but buffered, communicating via PR/Marketing/Designer. At least when the software being designed is for a non-technical application. If we're talking molecular modeling, sure let the programmers talk directly to the chemists.
From never recieving pre ordered copies of the game, to the game shipping on just run of the mill blank cd-r's, the game was plaqued with horrendus management.
Go try to read the official Mourning forums. Notice how they only go back to a certain date? They've deleted their forum database more than once. Not just a typical pruning but completely cleaned it cause so many of the fans, players, and even development team staff & moderators spoke out aganist it.
Imagine if one day a huge portion of say, SOE's player base (for any game, just as an example) spoke out aganist a huge list of problems, failures and broken promises. In this huge group of people is several key people in your production team, a good portion of your long time forum and community moderators, and even some of your own sponsors. Now imagine SOE just basically giving all those people a big middle finger, deleting the forums, and then rule over the "new" forums with an iron nazi fist (quite literally, meaning NO negative opinions). If you can piture all that, that is exactly what it was like for the Mourning players.
Aw Frell this
A bunch of guys with no industry experience got together to make a modern MMO faster, cheaper, and better than anyone else. They hired their friends who also had no industry experience to manage and lead the development. The guys mismanaged the project and the lack of experience amongst the team caused development to miss goals. They ran out of money. The End. I am not surprised that I never heard of this company nor this project.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/load/forums/l oadforum/51/loadthread/37720/setstart/1/loadclass/ 35
love the screen shot of the official GOLD game just being spindles after spindles of cd-rw's (note they DID ship just run of the mill burnt cd rw's in a small box with no artwork, as the official game....)
Aw Frell this
I certainly feel your pain. Going into a QA phase with little or no guidance as to what sort of game you're testing is a pain.
The problem, of course, is that a full, formal design document can often lead to a project's downfall. It works well if there are few unknowns (e.g. the technology, genre, and gameplay is well established), but for many other project types it can be a killer. For example, if the design document calls for one thing to happen, which turns out to be programmatically difficult or impossible, developers may find themselves churning out ugly workarounds or taking far more time than they should.
Most development these days doesn't follow the classic Waterfall model (design, build, test, complete), and instead goes for more evolutionary approaches (design, build, test, repeat until done). Of course, having a general plan of where you want to go is good, otherwise you won't know when you get there.
Grandparent post is quite alarming. I've been developing games for many years now and a thorough design documentation is pretty much essential to completing a good quality game on time and within budget.
It's possible to get by without one if you're creating a relatively simple game with an extremely small tight-knit team, but otherwise you're going to need that documentation to at least make sure everyone is building the same game. Producing a coherent design on paper is hard work and may not be as fun as jumping in and starting to build the game, but it forces you to think about the consequences of each design element you add. It's much easier to change the design at this stage rather than lose 2 months of development time because something added on a whim breaks another gameplay mechanic or renders something redundant. Trust me, I've seen it happen.
Having a robust design at the start of the project doesn't mean that it won't change over time. Many features you just can't really tell how "fun" they're going to be until you try them. Having the documentation there as a foundation will allow you to make changes more easily with minimum impact on the rest of the game. We've found it easiest to use a design wiki, so that the documentation can be kept up to date without too much hassle.
I've refused to work at companies that don't put in the effort at design stage; one company told me that in games development you don't have time for design - they closed down about two months later. And from the other side of the table, candidates who don't show the necessary appreciation for design will not do favorably in interviews. Call me a design nazi if you like, but I've wasted too much of my life poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly thunk-out projects.
Preach it, brother!
Some folks have never had a good design doc to work from, and can be excused for not appreciating them.
Others, in my opinion, are more interested in following their own pet features, and find building the game as designed too constricting.
May these folks someday run a studio full of employees just like themselves.
It's like building a bridge, where half the team is following the plan, bridging across to 10th street, and some others are of the opinion that 12th street would be a better terminus, and there's one guy who disagrees with the whole "suspension bridge" suggestion and is implementing his preferred "truss bridge" idea.
Now, if we could only convince the publishers and licensors to stop "reimagining" the bridge in the midst of construction...
What were you expecting?
I've just spent the last "while" looking all over the net for stuff about this game. It seems like the interview is true. They're currently randomly charging people's pre-order accounts without giving them the game and stuff like that. Some of the pre-order people are getting a white box with an unmarked CD containing an early beta of the game. They refuse to give refunds and the servers are not up. Most people paid 30 bucks, never got the game, and if they did they wouldn't be able to play it. This is just the surface of what has gone on. It looks like an idea that went horribly wrong adn then turned into an all-out scam. Really pathetic...
Well, there's the extreme programming approach, the fundamental tenet of which is "the program is the design". After all, is writing "foo" with a square around it and an arrow pointing to "bar" in a box any easier than
class foo : bar {}
?
The idea of XP is that the design document should be a quick thumbnail sketch. The rest should be thrashed out in the real world of code and computers with a minimum of gold plating, with a massive set of tests set up to make sure that the process of thrashing things around doesn't break anything you already finished.
In a game, the programmers may have very little need to talk to customers, if they're designing engine internals and the like. The game designer is the one who will be the most intense "user" of this engine. When designing UI elements, though, perhaps it's better to look at customer suggestions first, since they're the ones who will ultimately have to live with your system.
Last post!
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2625
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2706
They also put a banner or something on every page that said "Mourning sucks" or something of that nature. Basically, the people behind the game obviously had no skill at dealing with trolls, turning a snarky capsule preview into a big legal battle to decide the fate of the universe. Since I'm sure MMORPG developers have to deal with trolls on a regular basis, this couldn't have made them look good to anyone.
Rob
obviously during the course of a game's development, there is a lot of essential documentation created, but my point was that alot of people seem to assume that a 'game designer' works for weeks in a closet writing the 500 page game bible and then comes in and dumps it on the team saying 'make this'
most people don't realize how much collaboration and team effort is required THROUGHOUT the development process in order for a game to be innovative and successful.
it's a fine line - having too little (or misleading, improperly updated, outdated) documentation is worse than having too much, but what I've found is that when there is hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation, then it becomes a nightmare to maintain and update throughout the project.
then there's the eternal caveat about the design document:
- no one will read it.
you dump 500 pages of 'design' on a team and you can be guaranteed that most of them will not read it. sure they might skim through, but unless you are a master at organization and formatting (ie set it up as a well-organized intranet site or something similar) then there isn't a whole lot of chance that anyone on the team will truly read the document.
Gekido's Lair
Design documents are a bit like mission statements: a standing joke that is better than the alternative.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
More accurately why does they talk about this?
Why does-it matter where the money come from as long as it is from a legal source?
If no-one's reading it, you need to look at how you're writing it.
If you drop a 500 page tome in the middle of the room and expect people to start at page 1 and not stop until they've read through to the end, then yes, you're going to be disappointed.
It needs to be a source of reference, not an epic novel. I need to be able to flip to the AI section, spawning subsection and find a list of parameters that need to be definable when I'm preparing to implement that bit in the editor. If I have to trawl through up to 499 other pages before finding what I want, then it's not likely I'll be coming back to the doc for the next stage.