Duke Nukem Forever Gameplay Footage Leaked

Tjeerd writes, "It seems that while 3D Realms is dead, some new footage has been leaked of Duke Nukem Forever." 3D Realms posted a brief good-bye to their website, and two of the developers have hosted screenshots and concept art from DNF on their personal blogs. Also, for those who haven't seen it yet, there's an entertaining list of things that have happened during DNF's development cycle.

Comments

Cool, but, . . .

[cashman73]

It looked cool, but for all the years they put into the development, and redevelopment, and reredevelopment, I have to admit I was expecting more. I think it would be cool if they made the Duke Nukem series a big open source project -- let the community develop it. Either that, or give the intellectual property rights to a University with a good gaming development/design program, and let them use it to teach the various aspects of game design.

Re:What would have been nicer

[fractoid]

You must be new to software. The developers did the work probably 20 times over, and the management structure was so messed up that 90% of said work got thrown away. The problems are twofold:

1. Programmers and artists generally aren't "people persons" and as such are happy to focus on their passion and let someone else manage
2. Management is like investment banking. It's very difficult to tell the difference between good management and bad management until the shit hits the fan, and by then it's too late.

So what you end up with is either (as happens in successful software companies) someone forceful seizes control of the development process, and the success or failure of the team rests on their shoulders, or (as usually happens) no-one really takes charge, and everyone with vague job descriptions wastes all their time doing nothing (or doing meaningless busywork) while Rome burns.

It's generally a good sign of a software company's health if it has a clearly defined process not just for actual software development, but for planning and milestone setting. Even with a clear process in place, and even with management staff committed to transparency, it still takes a long while at the start of the project to weed out the idiots who slipped into management roles, and replace them with competent people. Once the weeding-out process is close to completion, the actual development work can start in earnest.