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Postmortem: Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz  What Went Wrong
Lack of Pre-ProductionWhen we started development on RoboBlitz, we jumped into the level creation process with very little pre-production. We knew the basic functionality of our robot and we knew we wanted action and puzzle oriented game play. In general, this put us in a mode of running along with whatever good ideas we had at the moment and keeping whatever worked best. This allowed for very fast, dynamic changes in the game design, which would have been fine if we were in pre-production. However, when we were adding new weapons and controls six months into an eleven-month project, it did not work out too well. The biggest problem with our lack of pre-production was that we didn’t nail down key game play mechanics and character movements before implementing the levels. Once the majority of the game was built, it became extremely burdensome whenever we had to add new features or tweak character movements. This meant we had to go back through the entire game and alter levels so that the new features didn’t break any of the existing ones. With a product that allows as much freedom of movement and game play as RoboBlitz, this was not a small task.
We were left changing significant play mechanics, controls, camera angles and level features only weeks before the content complete milestone. These new changes then required retranslation of localized text, sound effects tweaks, and art adjustments, which in turn generated their own regression issues. As a result, a few areas and aspects of the game were much less thoroughly tested than we would have liked. Over AmbitionEven though we had great people on our development team, there were only a few who had gone through the full development cycle for a retail title before, and this had far reaching repercussions. On the most basic level, we were not able to accurately estimate the impact of untested technology on the time it would take for us to implement the game. Therefore, because we had tons of great ideas, we chose a scope for the game that included more features than any sane, experienced studio would dare accept given the budget and timeline.
Because we underestimated the time and budget required for a game of this scale, we were understaffed right from the start. This required us all to wear several hats, sometimes leading to negative consequences. For instance, our lead programmer was also our system admin. Whenever there was an issue with the network or the bug tracker or the version control software, he had to stop programming to take care of it. Our overambitious design and understaffing sent the entire team into crunch mode for the majority of production. We had no choice but to work long hours to make deadlines, and this took a toll on our constitutions and quality of life. Luckily, every one on board was young and hearty, and in love with the project, so there were no permanent effects, but we will definitely do things differently from now on. |
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