The
story of Operation Flashpoint's development is quite unusual in
the game industry these days. For one thing, the team didn't start out
as professionals; originally only the lead programmer was allowed to work
on the game full-time. Switching publishers three times, starting a new
company, growing the team from one to 12 full-time members, and moving
offices five times during the game's development were just some of the
hurdles we had to clear. Only the team's vision and obsession for the
game remained consistent from the very first playable version until the
end. It's not possible to describe whole story in the space given for
this article, so let's just jump directly to the final moments.
It was 8
p.m. on Friday, May 25, 2001. Our publisher's representative, who had
been in Prague for the last few days to make sure everything was going
O.K. as we were finalizing the gold master, left Prague feeling confident
that things were going well — the disc was almost ready and could
be sent to final testing and then to manufacturing after some weekend
testing.
Meanwhile,
our lead programmer (to make matters even more exciting, he was then working
at his temporary home in France for couple of weeks) was trying to resolve
some serious graphical anomalies with the hardware transformation and
lighting (HW T&L) rendering. If he were to fail, HW T&L would
not be included in the final release. If he solved it, some data organization
changes would be necessary to suit the needs of the HW T&L. He spent
nearly the whole day resolving some random crashes that appeared in the
game during the last day, going back and forth over e-mail with an Nvidia
support engineer. The crash was fixed by late afternoon, and by 10 p.m.
it looked like the HW T&L problems were at an acceptable level. Around
midnight, the tools that would perform the data format change were ready.
On the other
front, the team had received the final localized strings for the game.
However, the file containing the core strings of the game that had been
delivered by our publisher appeared to be untested and unusable. After
spending a couple of hours dealing with it, most of the team had to go
home to have some sleep. Still, the team leader stayed behind at the office,
trying to use the new HW T&L data format, going over each step by
phone or
e-mail with the lead programmer (while also trying to implement new localized
string tables and fix some problems in the campaign and missions). At
3 a.m. it looked like all the data had been converted — and both
the lead programmer and the team leader could go have some sleep.
Saturday
morning, our publisher realized that the gold master hadn't actually been
delivered. Tensions rose even further, and nerves began to unravel. Only
two days remained before mass production was scheduled to begin. Everyone
on the team had been working since early Saturday morning, but at times
a successful end to these last-minute crises seemed to be so far away.
By around 5 p.m. on Saturday, most of the important issues in the code
had been resolved, and the lead programmer decided to take another look
at the HW T&L implementation. Luckily, within a few hours, he suddenly
discovered the root of all of the HW T&L problems and fixed them.
The plan was to deliver the gold master to our publisher via FTP by that
evening. Nobody expected that it would actually take until Sunday morning.
After a long, sleepless night of playing through the game and fixing any
problems that appeared, everything looked fine, and most of the team could
finally go to sleep again.
With some
relief, we finally started the game upload on Sunday around 9H But were
we done? Not yet. Suddenly, a seagull stopped flying in some of the in-game
cutscenes. The team leader called to wake up the lead programmer in France:
"The seagull is not flying. What should I do?" We had to stop
the upload until the lead programmer delivered necessary code fix. After
the project leader received the updated files from the lead programmer,
he started to rebuild the game in Visual Studio. It was Sunday around
noon, and the game had finally gone to the publisher for final testing.
The publisher's
test staff started playing the game Sunday afternoon. Everything went
smoothly at first, but later they discovered one serious scripting bug
in one of the campaign missions that made it unplayable. Late in the evening,
they called the team leader about the bug, and he had to drive to the
office after sleeping just a couple of hours over the past three days
to fix the bug as quickly as possible and then upload the fixed version
to the publisher's server in the U.K. Around midnight Sunday night, the
disc was finally ready to go.
Three weeks
later, hundreds of thousands of copies of the game were available in stores
worldwide. In the meantime, the development team was playing the game,
terrified of finding a disastrous bug. Fortunately, no such critical bug
appeared. Considering the amount of work we'd done on the game in those
last couple of days and hours, the risk of finding some major problems
was pretty high. On Friday, June 22, the game was released, and it immediately
became the top-selling PC game in many countries. The team knew that their
mission was successfully completed. The passion and hard work of every
single member of the development and publishing teams started to pay off.