Moving Forward

Contents

Oz -- The Magical Adventure Production What Went Right What Went Wrong Moving On

Like all projects of this magnitude, the real skill is learning from our mistakes and being able to apply the lessons learned to the next game. Feature creep, scheduling issues, navigation problems, and audio were our biggest challenges, but were all resolved and only served to strengthen ourunderstanding of the process.

For me, the best part of the project was experiencing how kids play and learn, discovering what makes them laugh, what bores them, and what they like in a game. Adapting a linear story to an interactive game was very challenging and satisfying, as was creating a 3D world and characters that children could relate to and enjoy.

Ultimately the real test lies with the kids' reactions. Watching our kid testers laugh and talk to the characters on screen made all the production problems worthwhile. Moving forward, we all hope to apply our experience to another adventure game sometime in the near future.

Game Data

Oz -- The Magical Adventure Sausage www.sausage.com.au Tel +61 (02) 9467-3000 Team size: 10 full-time developers, 5 contractors Release date: October 2000 Intended platforms: Pentium 166 Windows 95/98/00 NT, Power Mac 8.1 Project budget: Approx. AUD800,000 Project Length: 12 months Code length: 18,000 lines of lingo Critical development hardware: SGI O2s, Pentium II 500s, Mac Powerbook G3 Critical development software: Alias|Wavefront Maya, Alias|Wavefront Composer, Macromedia Director 7.02, All in a Dither (proprietary dithering software), Soundscape, Adobe Photoshop

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