[In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, Jeff Hasson of Redwood City-based Sniper Studios discusses the developer's experience in creating Crazy Taxi Fare Wars, a PSP version of Sega's arcade and console game series, with fascinating technical detail on the game's creation.]

When discussions began with Crazy Taxi Fare Wars, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on what the final packaged product would contain. Was it going to be a straight port? Should we have a career mode? In the end, we settled on two key elements: 1) to bring over a true port of both Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2 and 2) to add multiplayer gameplay modes.

Ultimately, we all agreed that this was a sound plan. Crazy Taxi in our minds had near-perfect gameplay, and bringing that same game to the PSP made a lot of sense. Adding multiplayer would give the game a new feel, and provide a significant enough challenge to engage the programming team.

The game would be built on a global scale, literally! We would be working with Black Hole Games in Budapest, Hungary. So in the end, we were counting on source code from Japan, published out of Sega in San Francisco, multiplayer developed in Redwood City, CA, and ported in Budapest, Hungary. Constant communication would be key to the completion of the project and for the most part this happened.

In a perfect world, bugs would be delivered at the end of the day in North America to hand off to the team in Budapest at the beginning of their day. Inevitably, there were days when this didn’t happen and days would be lost. Like any project, many things went well and many things didn’t go as planned. The following is a highlight of our development cycle.