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 Features
Postmortem: Blue Fang's Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania
 What Went Wrong
More, More, More!
I can’t think of any project that I’ve worked on where I haven’t wished for a little more time… and this one wasn’t an exception. Because we had established a clear project vision statement at the beginning of development, we were able to deliver all of the things that we felt were essential to the product. And we’re extremely pleased with our results. But even still, there are always the little things that you wish you could do, or the easter eggs you think of that you could add and we certainly had our share of those.
We also faced some serious pressure on resources…the human kind that is. Some members of the team were actually working on three different projects under the Zoo Tycoon 2 franchise simultaneously in areas that were notoriously hard to “schedule.” Not only did it stress some of the people who were in this situation but these multiple simultaneous Zoo projects also put a lot of pressure on QA…more on that a little later.
Animal training
How Clear is your Crystal Ball?
We had actually done a lot of design work on Marine while Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species was still in development. In fact we delivered our first Marine milestone, which was all of our documentation (functional spec, tech spec, schedule, etc…) to Microsoft within four weeks of delivering Endangered Species to manufacturing.
Needless to say there’s a lot of work in creating these documents and a few things were overlooked. For instance, although our initial schedule accounted for the fact that we needed to create animations for the guests sitting in the grandstands to react to marine shows, we overlooked the fact that the young guests needed their own specific animations for these actions as they would be unable to share those adult size animations. Oops! The technical spec and the schedule were probably the most impacted by this and fortunately we were able to revise our plans and absorb the things that fell through the cracks relatively painlessly (notice I did not say “pain-free”).
We also underestimated some of the difficulty in transitioning to 3D movement through water. We knew it would be hard of course but it proved to be even more challenging than we expected. A lot of time was spent in this area to smooth out the pops, deal with obstacle avoidance, transition between land and water, etc. We expected it, we just didn’t expect quite as much of it.
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