|
|
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
Postmortem:
Ritual Entertainment's What Went Wrong
1. No project management. During the development of F.A.K.K. 2, we had a project manager at the beginning of the project and a different project manager near the end. There were 12 months of development time in between, during which we had little to no management on the project. There were members of the team that took on this role, but only in a limited capacity, as they had tons of other work to do as well. Not having a single person manage tasks, and letting just about every feature request get added to the list, was a major reason why we had to go into crunch mode in order to finish everything by our July deadline. This resulted in a crunch mode that lasted nearly five months, and one month of "super crunch," consisting of seven-day weeks and 12- to 16-hour days. I don't mind crunch mode every now and then, but for an extended period of time it really wears you out. The team morale during this crunch was very low. We worked on never-ending task lists for months and months. Just when you thought you were close to being done with what you were assigned, another 30 tasks would appear on the list after a team meeting where we would flesh out the incomplete areas of the design. Having a good project manager allows you to have a majority of the design details fleshed out from the beginning, schedule the correct amount of time for tasks, and have the appropriate number of people on the team to finish a game. This seems to be a major problem in the gaming industry, as nearly everyone I talk to has just about the same story about project management and death-march crunch modes. 2. High team turnover rate on a small team. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that the team started off with 18 members, and we finished the game with 11. Of those 11 people, only one person was on the original F.A.K.K. 2 team from the beginning. It was a weird project, because most of the team didn't have a handle on the design of the game. The key designers of gameplay had moved on, and weren't available to talk about the ideas that they had come up with. We ended up scrapping a lot of the original design document and starting over. This set us back pretty far in the gameplay area. Another area that suffered was models and animations. We lost several artists who worked on different animation packages, and when they left we had to redo the models they were responsible for.
The gaming industry is a turbulent one; people join and leave companies on a regular basis, and it definitely has an impact no matter what anyone says. Unless a person didn't contribute anything to the game, losing personnel greatly impacts finishing a game on time. F.A.K.K. 2 had a very small team that had to work extra hard to make up for the lost employees that weren't replaced. In the end though, we were very satisfied with the game's quality in spite of having lost so many people during the course of development. 3. No multiplayer; a short game for hardcore players. As I said, F.A.K.K. 2 was designed as a single-player game from the start. We were going to try to put multiplayer into the final release if we had the time, but our July deadline came so quickly that we just didn't have the time to finish it. We also designed a very tight game that can be finished by hardcore game players in less than ten hours.
This was our biggest complaint from reviewers and players alike. I do agree that the game is on the short side, but we didn't want to put in dozens of levels that repeated the same gameplay over and over, as so many other games do. Even though I am defending our decision in this article, I do acknowledge it as one of the problems that we had with the design. A short game with no multiplayer has a very limited lifetime in the gaming industry. (Note: As of the writing of this article, a multiplayer patch is in the works that will provide arena-style battles in various F.A.K.K. 2 settings). 4. No demo before release. Our July deadline was fast approaching, and we had yet to release a playable demo to the Internet. This hurt us in two ways. First, we weren't able to build up any pre-game buzz by having a killer demo for our game, and when the game was released people seemed surprised to hear about it. Second, a lot of people will not buy a game unless they play a demo beforehand to see if they like it. Fortunately, we were able to get a demo out the door within two weeks of our release, but the jury is still out on whether or not this is a good or bad thing.
5. Complex systems. I mentioned this problem in the Sin Postmortem back in March 1999, and it looks like it hit us again. It's not surprising, since we used many of the same systems that we had in Sin, and we even extended them. Game design on the PC is becoming more and more complex as time goes on. Level designers aren't just creating levels anymore. They have to design puzzles, scripted events, cinematics, and on and on. In F.A.K.K. 2 this is all done through the scripting language, so each level designer had to be something of a programmer as well. On the artists' side, they also got a taste of programming. The effects system is driven entirely by text files, and the artists needed to learn the system's intricacies in order to get the effects they wanted. This complexity added more to the development time than we had anticipated. Even though everyone on the team was really familiar with the engine, getting used to the new tools and modifications took a lot of extra work. The scripts for F.A.K.K. 2 total nearly 10,000 lines. I'm not really sure if this problem is ever going to change in the industry. As people demand ever more immersive game environments, the complexity goes up in order to attain these goals.
________________________________________________________ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Features
