Deer Hunter's
Three-Month Development
Cycle

By
James Boer
Gamasutra
January 8, 1999
Vol. 3: Issue 1

Originally
Published in Game Developer Magazine, December 1998.

Deer Hunter's Three-Month Development Cycle

Introduction Lesson 1: Don't Over-Design Lesson 2: Don't Be Afraid to Design Dynamically & in Parallel Lesson 3: Smart Scheduling Lesson 4: Code Around Scheduling Delays Lesson 5: Create Meaningful Milestones

It's too easy for those who can't see under the hood of a project to want visual milestones. Oftentimes, however, when a game looks only half done, the work is actually 90 percent complete, or vice versa. It's important for project managers to understand this. The easiest solution is to involve the designers, artists, and programmers in the task of creating milestones. Because they're the ones doing the work, they should have a more instinctive feel for how to balance out the workload among equally separated project milestones. This also helps to clarify every individual's responsibilities right from the beginning.

I've seen examples of both approaches. When management alone tries to dictate the milestones, the results are often a huge, unbalanced mix of goals, which fall mostly into the "too easy" or "nearly impossible to achieve" categories. When someone who appreciates the technical aspects of the design is involved, the balance between milestones tends to be much more realistic.

You'll notice that all of these suggestions relate to design or other similar aspects of the project. Truth be known, that was really the only remarkable aspect of DEER HUNTER's development cycle. The other parts were pretty plain: solid object-oriented design principles (or solid structured programming techniques for you C programmers), careful programming, and hard work.

The question of code reusability and robustness might come up, and it is indeed a valid point. Minimizing design time doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing these elements. I would offer proof of this by mentioning that the same basic code set was used to create two derivative products, a big-game hunting simulation and a duck/goose hunting game. The success of DEER HUNTER was completely unexpected, yet we were able to use the existing code as an engine with which to create these other games, both of which made substantial improvements to the original game. DEER HUNTER has now even been ported to the Macintosh. There's no question that the code was well designed and quite robust. Individual programmers sticking to time-honored object-oriented programming techniques achieved the robustness of the code, not a fancy design document.

Remember that design time is essentially overhead. The faster you can get your team up and working, the more time they'll have to do what's really important: produce the game.


James Boer is a programmer, game designer, and musician. During the development of DEER HUNTER, ROCKY MOUNTAIN TROPHY HUNTER, and PRO BASS FISHING, he acted as designer, programmer, art coordinator, sound designer, and voice-talent. He currently resides in Seattle, Wash., and is working at WizBang Software Productions. He can be reached at jbsys@csi.com