Postmortem: Ngame's Chop Suey Kung Fu

What went right

1. Small game, small team. Building Chop Suey Kung Fu for WAP was just like back bedroom coding, a return to 1980’s values. The full-time team was one programmer. There was almost no design or production work required, and between us, we fitted everything else in between our other jobs. No heavy management, no major milestones, no publisher breathing down our necks, no endless committees all trying to add features, and no arguments between teams. Communication problems weren’t an issue – who’s to communicate with? Alice just built it.

Even when we moved to TV, we only added in a couple of artists and an HTML programmer for a few weeks. This doesn’t exactly bring you into the “big team” stakes. We briefed the artists for a couple of hours, then left them to get on with it.

Best of all, with such short development times, nobody had time to get bored. There wasn’t a death march, or even all-night bug-fixing sessions. It was frequently frenetic, and there were plenty of mad panics, and at times we started to wonder who was in control, but overall everything went pretty much to plan, and everybody in the company got involved. The nearest we ever got to creative differences was the recurrent argument about whether you should be able to see Kim Chi’s underwear when she did a Chop Suey Special, whether this was sexist, and if it was, what effect it would have on player numbers. By keeping it fast and light, and doing something well within our ability, it was immensely satisfying to build. The effect on staff morale when you build something quick and fun cannot be underestimated. It brings back a lot of the fun to the job – and isn’t that why we all joined the games industry in the first place?

2. Purpose-built tools. Most of the credit for the ease of development has to go to our in-house toolkit, Sin. It was designed to make coding client-server games as easy as possible, and it really proved its worth. It allowed us to create convergent content that could simultaneously handle clients on several different flavours of WAP, HDML, and HTML, giving us access to pretty much the complete range of wireless, Web and digital TV devices. It was easy to localise the content for different carriers and different languages. Our development costs were tiny as a result of using Sin.

3. Building an online property. Online-only properties are very nice indeed to work with after the constraints of CDs. For a start, you can concentrate on distributing the software, and not worry about box art, printed manuals, or any of that rubbish. Just the game. The time between finishing the game and getting it out live is also minimised, which gives your creative team instant feedback, not a long wait between gold master and publication.

It also means that you can easily patch or upgrade games. Your users don’t need to download anything, you haven’t got buggy software in the shops, and you don’t have version conflict problems. It’s all very clean. About a month after launch, we hit a completely unexpected snag. One carrier in the US found the name Chop Suey Kung Fu to be offensive to people of Chinese origin. We changed the name of the game, on that carrier only, to Extreme Kung Fu. One altered .wbmp file, one text string changed, new version uploaded, and job done in a couple of hours. Imagine recalling a CD-ROM from the shelves to change the name of the game – ouch! While being able to patch running games isn’t an excuse for releasing sloppy code, it does mean that you can worry a little less – any problems that do slip through the QA net aren’t going to sink you completely.

4. Great artwork. A year ago, generating WAP graphics was a black art. Now, people are beginning to relearn some of those skills that most of us lost 15 years ago – if we can remember that far back. Every pixel counts, and eye candy is just as important on a tiny screen as on a PlayStation 2. The graphics can make or break a WAP game, just like any other video game. Martin instinctively knew what we wanted, and getting the graphics done was unbelievably painless. In addition, working with files of under a kilobyte makes for very easy working methods. Everything went back and forth by email, and the process was marvellously streamlined. A producer’s joy!

	We needed strong characters, exciting martial arts moves, and a distinctive style.

The TV and Web artwork was all done in-house. The animation was very simple, with just a few frames for each move, and working at TV resolutions meant that everything could be done quickly and easily. It was real comic book style art, and this in itself helped make everybody enthusiastic. The short timescale between concept and finished artwork – typically a day or so – meant that the artists could really let rip, have some fun, and experiment. This energy and excitement came through to the finished game, and gives it a freshness we were trying hard to capture.