Slashdot Mirror
The Nuking of Duke Nukem
Rick Bentley writes with more on the story behind the meltdown of Duke Nukem Forever, the game that will now live on only as a cautionary tale: "Although the shutdown was previously reported on Slashdot, this new Wired article goes in-depth behind the scenes to paint a picture of a mushroom cloud-sized implosion. Developers spending a decade in a career holding pattern for below market salary with 'profit sharing' incentives, no real project deadlines, a motion capture room apparently used to capture the motion of strippers (the new game was to take place in a strip club, owned by Duke, that gets attacked by aliens), and countless crestfallen fans. *Sniff*, I would have played that game."
Using motion capture room for strippers is just badass.
Now the game is cancelled, can they at least release the data from the motion-captured strippers ?
Developers spending a decade in a career holding pattern for below market salary with 'profit sharing' incentives, no real project deadlines, a motion capture room apparently used to capture the motion of strippers.
I'd work for below market salary just to be able to work with no deadlines, let alone the free strippers in the office. :-)
Interesting note in the article also was
Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an advance in exchange for a big slice of the profits.
Since people usually complain about music labels being evil, would game developers survive without publishers that pay their costs? Sure, indie's do, but look at what happened to 3D Realms too, and they even financed lots from their own past revenues.
They never released it because the opposition kept getting better? If they could retain the great humour that went into the Duke3D, they would not need the latest and greatest in 3D gaming. It should stand alone.
Duke Nukem 3D was pretty average technically, but who cares when it is so funny and engaging. The saga of Duke Nukem Forever reminds me of how George Lucas discovered CGI, but forgot script writing. Just because something is pretty doesn't mean to say that it is good.
at some point common sense will tell you that this project isn't going anywhere and your job may be in trouble and maybe i should look for another job? it's like all the dot coms from 10 years ago where people drank the kool aid and thought that investors will just keep feeding them more money to have fun at the office even though there is no profit and no one has any idea how to make a profit
It sounds like, from the article, Broussard never really got the concept of iterative development. It sounds like 4 or times they had a game *almost* done, and then scrapped it. Why? I mean, on the one hand, I do understand the idea of not releasing crap that dilutes your 'name brand', but the article author seems to have indicated that every time they demo'ed their 'current' generation of tech, the crowd was wowed.
In the 10 years from 1998-2008 they could have released 4 or 5 great games, each one getting better than the last. Each one making some revenue to help you fund the next version. I've come to appreciate that developing software isn't a destination, it's a journey. Make a new version, give yourself a well-defined, finite set of new features, develop them, sell that version, then start working on the next version which adds all the cool features you just weren't able to work into the last version, but wished you had.
One of the points in the article was that they scrapped the Quake II engine for Unreal, because Q2 just couldn't render the outside deserts around Las Vegas the way they wanted. I think, faced with the same problem, I would have just said, "No outside levels in this version - if we can't make them look decent, don't make them at all; we'll do it in the next version" - although, possibly I could see that one reboot as being necessary - probably the game would have been really missing something if there were no outdoor environments. So, I could see that change could have been necessary, switching to Unreal, but once they switched, they should have committed to shipping *a* game based on that engine, and only worried about changing up engines once they started work on the *next* game, after shipping DNF.
Well, at least young'uns like me can learn from 3DR's mistake.
“George’s genius was realizing where games were going and taking it to the next level...” No. From TFA, it appears that as far as DNF is concerned, George was not an innovator at all. Instead of coming up with his own ideas, he wasted 12 years trying to play catch-up to every new shiny thing that got released.
I'll work on an open source project when my lawyer and my doctor start providing free consultations.
There's another name for what killed DNF: "feature creep". Classic mistake. So is hiring extra people to work on a project that's already late.
After reading the article, it's blindingly obvious that what really killed the project was nothing but bad project management.
"Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
We'll be done when it's ready.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The closest was Deus Ex. Huge, gigantic game with an immersive environment that rewarded you for being cunning. But still no radio-detonated pipebombs. :)
"The perfect is the enemy of the good." My bias has always towards getting a product into the hands of customers, not towards academic correctness. Yes, the story of DNF should be taught as a textbook case in bad product management. Rule #1: if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party tools and then decide not to use them, you should be fired for bad judgment, pure and simple.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's more like picking up trash at a public park or nature preserve - it helps everyone.