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By Bartosz Kijanka
Gamasutra
[Author's Bio]
December 18, 2002

Introduction

What Went Right

What Went Wrong

Lessons from the Dungeon

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Game Developer Magazine Back Issues four CD Set.
Every issue 1994 to April 2002.
Price: $189.00 + S&H

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Features

Postmortem: Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege

Lessons from the Dungeon

Dungeon Siege was an extremely challenging project. Four years is a long time to work on a game. By comparison, it's long enough to earn a bachelor's degree in college, or go back for a Ph.D. Four years is time enough for births, deaths, weddings, breakups, and earthquakes. A lot of life happens in four years, and a lot of learning takes place.

Clearly, we walk away from Dungeon Siege with valuable experience, both from what we did well and from our missteps. With experience comes perspective, and our perspective is much broader now than when we started. For better, for worse, and for everything in between, we will feel the reverberations of this experience for a long time to come.


Publisher: Microsoft

Number of Full-time developers: 27 at ship date

Number of Contractors:
5

Length of Development:
3 years, 8 months

Release Date:
April 5, 2002

Platform:
PC

Development software used:
MS Dev C++, 3DS Max with Character Studio, Visual SourceSafe, CodeWright, ICQ, RAID (bug tracking), Photoshop, Excel

Development hardware used:
Ranged over course of development from 400-1000MHz CPUs with128-512MB RAM

Notable Technologies:
Bink, Miles, SmartHeap

Project Size:
Approximately 800,000 lines of source code for game, editor, and associated tools; 60,000 lines of scripts; 21 million total lines of .GAS configuration files; 8,500 textures, 2,000 animations, 2,600 object and actor meshes, 3,700 terrain meshes

 

 

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