Postmortem on a Student Project

Gamasutra continues to expand their coverage of student game design programs, with a postmortem on the student project Insignia. A group of six students spent most of a year working on an RPG/RTS hybrid using the d20 license from Wizards of the Coast. From the entertaining writeup: "The process of pitching our idea was highly informative and gave us an industry perspective, insight and positive feedback from the judges. The pressure of competition also helped really focus the team's efforts rather than the more nebulous approach of most student projects."

Comments

Nebulous eh?

[Thunderstruck]

Probably the most valuable lesson to be learned from this is that the nebulous approach never really gets a person anywhere. No matter what the industry, it's all about follow-through. How many folks out there started writing/coding/desinging the perfect game? How many folks still have a stack of notes out there in a closet somewhere, under a stack of 5.25 floppies, that would have been a great novel, or the next Freecraft?

Which brings me to my next question, can schools teach follow-through, or is that something innate?

(And on a related note, if schools figure out how to teach follow-through, will we see some "entertainment" that's better than mass produced game sequels, reality television, or yet-another-AD&D knockoffs we have now?)

(Or is the internet living proof that there really is nothing new under the sun?)

Re:Nebulous eh?

[gfxguy]

I don't know if that's true, though... some of the best games seem to be the simplest. It's only the modern push for things to be realistic 3D (wether or not it makes sense) that has created the need for these teams of people.

Lode Runner was written by one guy. Tetris... some of the most fun and original games. Moreso are the games with small development teams.

Software engineering has taught us that there are diminishing returns by throwing more developers at a project - to the point of being counter productive. I wonder if there's too many chefs on some of these projects that seem to take so long.

What went right/wrong...

[AdamTrace]

So, to recap:

What went Right: We got a license, a good team of folks, ambition and potential up the ying-yang...

What went Wrong: Everything else. Too big an idea, using a complex engine that no one was familiar with in a way that it probably wasn't designed, low skills, not enough resources, not enough time...

I've attempted enough game-programming to know that a good idea, early ambition and motivation and basic programming skills account for about 3% of the success of a project. The HARD part is turning those huge ideas into a reality, and sticking with the same project over months and years.

Still, better to try and fail than to sit on their asses. I don't mean to sound too critical, as I'm sure they learned a huge amount, both technically and otherwise.

Adman

Yeah right...

[Anonymous Coward]

6 Industry Support. When we went to seek advice on how to make our game, we discovered that there were few industry resources available. Game development studios do not share their information, techniques, time or ideas as a general rule, and tend to be overly protective or non-communicative. ...

As someone involved with UnrealEngine modding, and other stuff. I have my doubts on that whole section.
I don't know how the deal is with other engines\companies. But Epic provides a lot of information and support to the modding community. Also the unreal modding community has quite a few active people that also work with the UnrealEngine for a living.
So they're either making stuff up or asked the wrong people (like the publisher, or a UnrealEngine licensee). Or they tried to get answers via private channels (e.g. directly emailing a certain , already swamped in work, developer) because the stuff they were working on needs to remain secret (or insert some other lame reason).

Re:So they failed...

[Tycho]

I think an example of why publishers and dev houses are so cautious is they look at what happened to Troika and see what creativity got them. Early last year (2005) Troika went bankrupt. Troika developed three published games: Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil(ToEE), and Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines(VtM:B). All of these games are very creative are and each has elements that are excellent and on the whole I think they are good games. However, they all seem to suffer from many of the same flaws, such as bugs, unfinished areas, and serious computing requirements for their time. All of these games have several show stopping bugs require their respective official patches and many benefit from unofficial patches released by fans. There are several unfinished areas in ToEE where there are empty chests in some areas and other annoyances. Every Troika game required a high-end PC of the time to play them. When I played these games I never noticed any serious slowdowns, though I had a mid to high range PC when each game was released. I did notice some slowdowns, but I never thought they were serious. However, reports from users in forums seemed to give me the impression that a mid to low range computer at that time just could not play these games at a resonable speed.