What
Went Wrong
1.
Bad timing
Many aspects
of the game's timing worked against us. While the Quake 3 vs.
UT hype increased our exposure, it also set a very hard deadline
for completion. It was critical that we complete the game before Quake
3 was released. The media advantage belonged to id and we believed
that if Unreal Tournament launched after Quake 3, we would
be forgotten in the storm. At the same time, however, we were caught
up in grueling contract renegotiations with GT Interactive. We did not
want to deliver the completed game until we knew the contract would
work in our favor. Many times during the development of the game we
were promised that a resolution to the contract issue was close at hand.
The team would race to reach a point where the game could be shipped,
only to have negotiations drag on.
The gold
master was delivered to GT days after a final contract was agreed upon.
Unfortunately, the game hit shelves in November, pushing us very close
to Quake 3's release date. While Unreal Tournament often
performed better than Quake 3 in reviews, we believe that sales
would have been much higher still had we released in October. Word-of-mouth
is a powerful force and the extra month would have given us time to
build a larger community before Christmas.
2.
No central design document
While
I am a big supporter of open, cabal-style design, I have to stop and
wonder how Unreal Tournament would have turned out had we a strong
initial design. It's quite possible that the game's weaker elements
would have been much stronger if we had put together some concept art
and focus material. In reviews, we have been criticized for not having
enough variation in characters. If Unreal Tournament had had
a library of concept art to draw from, we might have had more interesting
alien warriors. The story is more or less nonexistent in Unreal Tournament,
but at times we considered having in-game cutscenes as rewards for a
player's progress. The idea was dumped, but a design document might
have made it easier to visualize those scenes.
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The
Unreal Tournament development team felt that several of
Unreal's weapons were a lot
of fun. Here is a bot carrying the Shock Rifle,
an updated version of Unreal's ASMD.
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I suppose
this isn't really a "what went wrong." It's simply more of
a "what we should have done." I think it's important to think
about the game in that light. Unreal Tournament is a very fun
game with a lot of features packed into a short amount of development
time. Those features were largely added through spur-of-the-moment decisions.
A more unified approach to design would have allowed us to construct
features that play on features, or even think of ideas we didn't have
the perspective to realize. Epic will always be a very open, liberal
company when it comes to the design process. If we develop a design
document, we'll use it with the understanding that it can be modified
at any time. That having been said, I think there is a definite positive
argument for having some sort of central guide to everyone's ideas.
Having the ability to sit down and look over the big picture is very
valuable.
3.
Co-development across two countries
Epic
Games and Digital Extremes co-developed Unreal Tournament. The
Digital Extremes team was located in Canada and Epic was located in
the U.S. Epic supplied the programming team and a large group of content
designers. Digital Extremes provided level designers, a sound guy, and
texture artists. James Schmalz, the high-up man at Digital Extremes,
contributed two of the game's player models and a lot of art. This co-development
worked well for the most part, but near the end of the project it became
very difficult.
During
Unreal, Epic team members flew to Canada to work at Digital Extremes'
offices. With Unreal Tournament, it became Digital Extremes's
turn to do the traveling. Unfortunately, flying and driving back and
forth every couple of weeks is a very draining experience. Many of the
Digital Extremes team members spent several weeks away from their wives
and girlfriends. Near the end of the project, they grew increasingly
frustrated with the situation. To compound this problem further, Digital
Extremes and Epic were attempting an expensive merger. As Unreal
Tournament came to a close, it became clear that the merger would
not happen. It was prohibitively expensive for a small company to move
across the border. Many Digital Extremes team members already had apartments
and plans for living in Raleigh, and the news of the terminated merger
process was devastating.
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In
the Assault game type, players have to
enter a heavily defended base and complete
map-specific objectives to win. Assault was
the most difficult Unreal Tournament game
type to design, balance, and play-test.
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Much to
Digital Extremes's credit, the company quickly recovered and moved to
its backup plan of developing its own game with the Unreal Tournament
engine. Nonetheless, the process of co-developing the game had taken
its toll on everyone. The ups and downs of the merger process had a
negative effect on team morale. Had the co-development happened between
companies more closely situated, it would not have been a problem.
4.
Not enough artists
On the
content side, Unreal Tournament was held back by the number of
available artists. Epic's artist, Shane Caudle, is a supreme Jack-of-all-trades,
creating skins, models, and levels of the highest quality. He spent
most of his time working on new player models and skins for those models.
Digital Extremes brought a few texture artists to the table, but not
enough to create the huge libraries of new textures needed for the game.
In order to supplement the skin and texture production, Epic turned
to contract artist Steve Garofalo.
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Steve
Polge, our AI and game play
programmer, made the bots understand
the unique advantages and disadvantages
of each weapon. Here a bot is moving in
very close to use the powerful Flak Cannon.
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Even with
the additional help from external sources, the team was unable to produce
enough new textures. Level designers who wanted custom textures for
their maps had to make do with their own texturing ability. While the
final texture and level count in Unreal Tournament is quite high,
the levels would have been much more impressive had the team been able
to act with full freedom. Since the completion of Unreal Tournament,
Epic has hired both Steve Garofalo and John Mueller to strengthen the
art team for future projects.
5.
Visual Basic editor interface
The Unreal
Tournament engine uses UnrealEd as its level design and content
management tool. For several years, UnrealEd has used a windowing interface
written in Visual Basic. The VB code is fragile and very old. Add to
this the fact that nobody at Epic except Tim Sweeney knows or cares
about VB, and you have a level design team that is stuck with a tool
that's not easily updated.
Several
interface bugs have plagued UnrealEd for some time and nobody on the
team had the time or inclination to fix them. If we had a more easily
extensible tool, the team would have been able to add extra features
to the editor for level designers to use. As it stood, the editor was
considered "off limits" for new features.
For our
next few projects we will most likely use a new C++ editor that Legend
Entertainment developed. For Unreal Tournament, however, we simply
didn't have the time to work on a new editor. Fortunately, our time
spent using UnrealEd taught us the dos and don'ts of tool design.