Call of Duty - The Lawsuit

Gamasutra is running a follow-up to their annotated contract piece from last month. As you may recall, the contract became public knowledge because of a court case between Spark unlimited and Activision regarding the title Call of Duty : Finest Hour. The article also covers a legal dispute between Spark/Activision and EA during the formation of the troubled development house. Now, the site is running an in-depth look at their legal dispute. The article explores some of the problems that can face any developer/publisher relationship, and how the legal case has affected that already strained situation. "A constant source of friction was Activision's desire to see a fully functioning game early in the development process. 'At Electronic Arts', he wrote, 'the level vision was able to be constructed without the constraints of frame rate, or memory to get the body of the game in and working,' a process which left polish until the end of the development cycle. 'However, under the more risk-averse Activision system, polish happens through the entirety of the process and there is a consistent desire to have the game playable on disc and running at 30 fps.'"

Comments

Re:Agile Game Development

[HappySqurriel]

Way back in the day (when I was a game developer, before I 'burnt out') I used to argue that it would make more sense to build a rough prototype of every level in the game (using assets that wouldn't even look good for a Playstation game) and then to work in short iterations to improve the overall quality of the game. I argued that, although early versions of the game would not be useful for public consumption, the overall quality of the game should be better in the end ...

I don't know if I was correct, but I have been hearing that the basic principles of my idea are being used by more and more development houses because it allows for far more parallel development (meaning you can have a larger team rather than a longer development cycle).