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I was reading OPSM2's interview with Dave Doak (the guy who developed Goldeneye, formed Free Radical Design, and then made Timesplitters 1&2) regarding Timesplitters 2 a few nights ago.
One very interesting comment he made was how loads of fans gave Free Radical Design (Dave's company) a really hard time about not including online capabilities in this game. Comments like "Sure if you worked another 2 months on the title, it would be online capable" were made, where in reality (at least according to Dave) it would take maybe 2 more years to get a good online version up and running.
Anyway this interview brought to mind the fact that many people get very annoyed when a game gets delayed, and never stop to think about the reasons why.
I really feel that as technology progresses, and processors speed up, our tolerance for delays gets smaller and smaller!
Think back to when post was the main type of mail communication. We were happy enough to wait a few days for a letter to arrive. But now if an email or SMS text gets delayed by an hour or so we usually get very annoyed.
When will we ever reach the stage that we are happy with what we get?
I guess developers themselves are part of the problem. If we were never told that Timesplitters 2 would be online then we wouldn't be complaining about the fact that this feature was not included. Or if Rockstar games never told us that GTA Vice City was in development then we wouldn't get all stroppy when it got delayed a bit... and do you think that would affect its sales when it eventually gets released? No chance. So maybe too much publicity is a bad thing.
In the days of the ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64, we would buy games magazines (man I feel a bit old now) like CRASH! and ZAPP!. These magazines would tell us all about the latest games, what is in development etc. but, more often than not, anything that appeared in either magazine would be released within a week or two of publication. So we never had a long waiting period for the games we just heard about (and of course the reason for that is that games were so much smaller in those days).
Now, of course, we hear about games months (and sometimes years) in advance. This only serves to get us all excited for a while, then we get impatient, then annoyed as delays set in, then excited again (but not as much, in my opinion, since we've been waiting for so long). Then we get the game we've been waiting for and our anticipation has been built up so much that we are usually disappointed to some extent with the end product. Are we ever happy? (Look at the amount of posts at the moment saying what should be included in GTA Vice City.... do you really think anything new could possibly get included now? Not a hope I'm afraid... so I can guarantee you that people will straight away pick holes in this (sure to be a classic) game once it is released next month).
Saddest of all cases is when game sellers, like SR and any others, get stick for games being late. Yes, I have seen it happen, and to be honest it is a ridiculous.
I think we really need to be more patient with developers and delays. Just consider what steps are involved in getting a game developed.
Obviously if a developer falls down or neglects any of these stages then chances are their game will not be great, but if they do follow these steps (or a similar design process) properly then it is obvious that there are many areas where delays can take place.
Don't get me wrong, I hate delays too, but I can understand the reasons why they happen.
What I am trying to highlight is how, in any phase of a games development, things can go wrong and introduce delays - but that if these issues are not addressed, or enough effort is not put into any of the stages, then a substandard game will be the result (the steps here are simplified so as not to bore you too much!) (Note this is my guess at how a game gets developed, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong):
Choosing a topic, story, and goal for the game
------------------------------------------------------------
It is critical to have a good idea for a game and a decent storyline (if the game requires it). The goal of a game must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will draw out of its audience.
If the time spent during this phase of game development is cut short, in order to meet a planned deadline (remember each phase of any design has its own deadlines), then a substandard game idea will be born. This is obviously a bad start for any game trying to make it in today's competitive market. Just look at the amount of posts on this forum about crap storylines.
Research and preparation
----------------------------------------------
With the storyline and goal worked out to a basic level, it is time to go and research the idea. This means getting feedback from the public through magazines, the web, and just plain talking to gamers.
How many times have you seen a brief description of a game appearing in a magazine, only to disappear after a few months and reappear with a completely different concept? That has to happen due to negative feedback from the press and public (in a lot of cases).
Cutting corners in this phase means that the developer isn't taking the time to listen to what the gamers want, and many many clever ideas for games just get dropped.
Look how long Rockstar spent getting ideas for GTA Vice City, yes the game was delayed a bit, but will it be worth it.... Of course it will!
Another important aspect of this phase is producing a prototype or storyboards of the game, so that the developer can show it to publishers and get sponsorship to go ahead and design the game. It saddens me to think of how many great games could have been developed if the designers just spent more time on the promotional side of things in order to win good sponsorship deals.
Design Phase
-------------------------------
Now it is time to get down to the real game design. There are three main aspects to a game that must be considered. The I/O (input/output) structure, the Game structure, and the Program structure.
- I/O structure: This deals with how we as players relate to the game, and how the game relates to us.
Input deals with how the game is to be controlled. What button configurations are best suited to the game at hand. Will analogue techniques be used, and how?
It also must detail every Analogue/Digital controller movement and button press (and combinations of these) and assign some meaning to it in terms of what happens in the game.
Output deals with how the game tells us what is going on... i.e. what graphical indications on screen that tell us what to do (i.e. like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time... the blue button changes functions depending on where the game character is.... crawl into hole... open door... etc.). How many times have you bought a game with a terrible controller setup? Or how many times have you spent trying to figure out how to interact with some parts of the environment in a game?
Also output will determine how the game will look to the user (I'm sure I don't need to explain how important that is). Without the correct amount of time spent on this aspect, the game becomes a burden to play.
Also sound is a major aspect of this design phase.... Voice acting, special effects, musical score.... Again, all critical components.
- Game structure: This is the part of design that lays out the game environment and objects (trees, characters, guns ... everything) and describes how each interacts and behaves. Imagine if Konami didn't give developers enough time to spend on this for MGS2. Many of the details (e.g. shooting ice-cubes) would be missed, and the interaction with the environment would become inconsistent (which I know annoys a lot of people, judging to the recent posts about realism).
Obviously cutting corners at this point will cause flaws in the game, and would give us a less than credible game world to play in.
- Program structure: This is the nuts and bolts of the design. What languages to program in, how to allocate memory in the most efficient way and so on. The more time spent here, the less we gamers need to worry about framerate drops, glitching, long loading times, and the numerous other faults we find in games many many times.
Of course everything in these design stages must be documented very carefully and intricately, and, funnily enough, this takes more time. Without good documentation it is hard to determine why decisions were made, and what the thinking was behind various design aspects.
Design evaluation
--------------------------
Once the development team is satisfied that each of the stages above are complete and that they are compatible with each other, the next stop in the design phase is to evaluate the overall design for the most common design flaws that plague games.
The first thing to determine is whether or not the proposed design meets the overall goal of the game. If a designed game looks like it will not excite / scare / upset / or whatever the player then something has gone wrong, and time needs to be spent to sort this out.
Also the design documentation should give a good indication of whether or not the game will be stable once developed. I personally have seen many games crash or just stop dead in the middle of gameplay... for no apparent reason.
Also, at this point a decision can be made on whether the game actually gets developed or not.
Pre-programming phase
--------------------------------
Once the game is ready to go, care and attention (and, wait for it...... TIME!!) is needed to fully document how the game is to be programmed. Mistakes or rush jobs at this point will introduce faults that could possibly slip through the testing phase.
Programming
-------------------
Believe it or not, this is often said to be the easiest part of any design project. With a good quality of input documentation available, an experienced programmer should not have too much trouble actually programming the software. That being said this is a lengthy and intricate process in itself. Also this part of the design is often not allocated enough development time, with designers working crazy hours to meet the programming deadlines.
Playtesting
-----------------
Presumably every gamer dreams of this as their uber-job at some stage in life (I know I did, and sometimes still do!), but if you consider what a tester has to actually do, then the picture is not so glamorous or fun.
Imagine having to play a game repeatedly, trying out every possible combination of events... moving the character to a certain position... checking nothing happens... moving to another sightly different position.... checking again... and again... and again... and ..... you get the picture.
Any problems found at this stage need to be fixed, and that can often mean a major re-design of the game.
Skipping on testing at all will leave the gamer with a potentially glitch-ridden piece of software that will only flop when it hits the shops.
Post mortem
------------------
Just for completeness it should be mentioned that developers will always have a post mortem on any game that is produced... just to see what people think and to generate ideas for improvements in future versions / sequels of the game or in new games.
This is when developers get to see all their hard work and efforts smashed (often enough deservedly so for not making enough of an effort in game development)or praised by the critics.
By now it should be obvious that a great deal of effort and time is needed to design any game (and I didn't bother to go into the effort needed for package design, instructions, censor certification etc etc.) Any developer worth their salt will delay a game until they are happy that it really can't get any better. Which is why we always get game delays.
On the other side of the coin, some developers push games out very quickly just to generate revenue. And these titles are very often of substandard quality. This to me is just plain stupidity on the side of the developers. How can they expect their games (and also themselves) to gain the respect they need in order to make it big if they don't put the effort in to them?
It baffles me to think of a game developer producing a low quality game (Army Men games being a case in point) and looking at it before release day, and saying "Yes, that is ready to be put out on the market".... surely they are not happy with the finished product?
Are they?
So come one.... let's give developers a break. Next time you get annoyed about "yet another delay" stop and remember that the delay is there so that we can get a better gaming experience on release day. That can't be a bad thing.
Can it?
One very interesting comment he made was how loads of fans gave Free Radical Design (Dave's company) a really hard time about not including online capabilities in this game. Comments like "Sure if you worked another 2 months on the title, it would be online capable" were made, where in reality (at least according to Dave) it would take maybe 2 more years to get a good online version up and running.
Anyway this interview brought to mind the fact that many people get very annoyed when a game gets delayed, and never stop to think about the reasons why.
I really feel that as technology progresses, and processors speed up, our tolerance for delays gets smaller and smaller!
Think back to when post was the main type of mail communication. We were happy enough to wait a few days for a letter to arrive. But now if an email or SMS text gets delayed by an hour or so we usually get very annoyed.
When will we ever reach the stage that we are happy with what we get?
I guess developers themselves are part of the problem. If we were never told that Timesplitters 2 would be online then we wouldn't be complaining about the fact that this feature was not included. Or if Rockstar games never told us that GTA Vice City was in development then we wouldn't get all stroppy when it got delayed a bit... and do you think that would affect its sales when it eventually gets released? No chance. So maybe too much publicity is a bad thing.
In the days of the ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64, we would buy games magazines (man I feel a bit old now) like CRASH! and ZAPP!. These magazines would tell us all about the latest games, what is in development etc. but, more often than not, anything that appeared in either magazine would be released within a week or two of publication. So we never had a long waiting period for the games we just heard about (and of course the reason for that is that games were so much smaller in those days).
Now, of course, we hear about games months (and sometimes years) in advance. This only serves to get us all excited for a while, then we get impatient, then annoyed as delays set in, then excited again (but not as much, in my opinion, since we've been waiting for so long). Then we get the game we've been waiting for and our anticipation has been built up so much that we are usually disappointed to some extent with the end product. Are we ever happy? (Look at the amount of posts at the moment saying what should be included in GTA Vice City.... do you really think anything new could possibly get included now? Not a hope I'm afraid... so I can guarantee you that people will straight away pick holes in this (sure to be a classic) game once it is released next month).
Saddest of all cases is when game sellers, like SR and any others, get stick for games being late. Yes, I have seen it happen, and to be honest it is a ridiculous.
I think we really need to be more patient with developers and delays. Just consider what steps are involved in getting a game developed.
Obviously if a developer falls down or neglects any of these stages then chances are their game will not be great, but if they do follow these steps (or a similar design process) properly then it is obvious that there are many areas where delays can take place.
Don't get me wrong, I hate delays too, but I can understand the reasons why they happen.
What I am trying to highlight is how, in any phase of a games development, things can go wrong and introduce delays - but that if these issues are not addressed, or enough effort is not put into any of the stages, then a substandard game will be the result (the steps here are simplified so as not to bore you too much!) (Note this is my guess at how a game gets developed, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong):
Choosing a topic, story, and goal for the game
------------------------------------------------------------
It is critical to have a good idea for a game and a decent storyline (if the game requires it). The goal of a game must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will draw out of its audience.
If the time spent during this phase of game development is cut short, in order to meet a planned deadline (remember each phase of any design has its own deadlines), then a substandard game idea will be born. This is obviously a bad start for any game trying to make it in today's competitive market. Just look at the amount of posts on this forum about crap storylines.
Research and preparation
----------------------------------------------
With the storyline and goal worked out to a basic level, it is time to go and research the idea. This means getting feedback from the public through magazines, the web, and just plain talking to gamers.
How many times have you seen a brief description of a game appearing in a magazine, only to disappear after a few months and reappear with a completely different concept? That has to happen due to negative feedback from the press and public (in a lot of cases).
Cutting corners in this phase means that the developer isn't taking the time to listen to what the gamers want, and many many clever ideas for games just get dropped.
Look how long Rockstar spent getting ideas for GTA Vice City, yes the game was delayed a bit, but will it be worth it.... Of course it will!
Another important aspect of this phase is producing a prototype or storyboards of the game, so that the developer can show it to publishers and get sponsorship to go ahead and design the game. It saddens me to think of how many great games could have been developed if the designers just spent more time on the promotional side of things in order to win good sponsorship deals.
Design Phase
-------------------------------
Now it is time to get down to the real game design. There are three main aspects to a game that must be considered. The I/O (input/output) structure, the Game structure, and the Program structure.
- I/O structure: This deals with how we as players relate to the game, and how the game relates to us.
Input deals with how the game is to be controlled. What button configurations are best suited to the game at hand. Will analogue techniques be used, and how?
It also must detail every Analogue/Digital controller movement and button press (and combinations of these) and assign some meaning to it in terms of what happens in the game.
Output deals with how the game tells us what is going on... i.e. what graphical indications on screen that tell us what to do (i.e. like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time... the blue button changes functions depending on where the game character is.... crawl into hole... open door... etc.). How many times have you bought a game with a terrible controller setup? Or how many times have you spent trying to figure out how to interact with some parts of the environment in a game?
Also output will determine how the game will look to the user (I'm sure I don't need to explain how important that is). Without the correct amount of time spent on this aspect, the game becomes a burden to play.
Also sound is a major aspect of this design phase.... Voice acting, special effects, musical score.... Again, all critical components.
- Game structure: This is the part of design that lays out the game environment and objects (trees, characters, guns ... everything) and describes how each interacts and behaves. Imagine if Konami didn't give developers enough time to spend on this for MGS2. Many of the details (e.g. shooting ice-cubes) would be missed, and the interaction with the environment would become inconsistent (which I know annoys a lot of people, judging to the recent posts about realism).
Obviously cutting corners at this point will cause flaws in the game, and would give us a less than credible game world to play in.
- Program structure: This is the nuts and bolts of the design. What languages to program in, how to allocate memory in the most efficient way and so on. The more time spent here, the less we gamers need to worry about framerate drops, glitching, long loading times, and the numerous other faults we find in games many many times.
Of course everything in these design stages must be documented very carefully and intricately, and, funnily enough, this takes more time. Without good documentation it is hard to determine why decisions were made, and what the thinking was behind various design aspects.
Design evaluation
--------------------------
Once the development team is satisfied that each of the stages above are complete and that they are compatible with each other, the next stop in the design phase is to evaluate the overall design for the most common design flaws that plague games.
The first thing to determine is whether or not the proposed design meets the overall goal of the game. If a designed game looks like it will not excite / scare / upset / or whatever the player then something has gone wrong, and time needs to be spent to sort this out.
Also the design documentation should give a good indication of whether or not the game will be stable once developed. I personally have seen many games crash or just stop dead in the middle of gameplay... for no apparent reason.
Also, at this point a decision can be made on whether the game actually gets developed or not.
Pre-programming phase
--------------------------------
Once the game is ready to go, care and attention (and, wait for it...... TIME!!) is needed to fully document how the game is to be programmed. Mistakes or rush jobs at this point will introduce faults that could possibly slip through the testing phase.
Programming
-------------------
Believe it or not, this is often said to be the easiest part of any design project. With a good quality of input documentation available, an experienced programmer should not have too much trouble actually programming the software. That being said this is a lengthy and intricate process in itself. Also this part of the design is often not allocated enough development time, with designers working crazy hours to meet the programming deadlines.
Playtesting
-----------------
Presumably every gamer dreams of this as their uber-job at some stage in life (I know I did, and sometimes still do!), but if you consider what a tester has to actually do, then the picture is not so glamorous or fun.
Imagine having to play a game repeatedly, trying out every possible combination of events... moving the character to a certain position... checking nothing happens... moving to another sightly different position.... checking again... and again... and again... and ..... you get the picture.
Any problems found at this stage need to be fixed, and that can often mean a major re-design of the game.
Skipping on testing at all will leave the gamer with a potentially glitch-ridden piece of software that will only flop when it hits the shops.
Post mortem
------------------
Just for completeness it should be mentioned that developers will always have a post mortem on any game that is produced... just to see what people think and to generate ideas for improvements in future versions / sequels of the game or in new games.
This is when developers get to see all their hard work and efforts smashed (often enough deservedly so for not making enough of an effort in game development)or praised by the critics.
By now it should be obvious that a great deal of effort and time is needed to design any game (and I didn't bother to go into the effort needed for package design, instructions, censor certification etc etc.) Any developer worth their salt will delay a game until they are happy that it really can't get any better. Which is why we always get game delays.
On the other side of the coin, some developers push games out very quickly just to generate revenue. And these titles are very often of substandard quality. This to me is just plain stupidity on the side of the developers. How can they expect their games (and also themselves) to gain the respect they need in order to make it big if they don't put the effort in to them?
It baffles me to think of a game developer producing a low quality game (Army Men games being a case in point) and looking at it before release day, and saying "Yes, that is ready to be put out on the market".... surely they are not happy with the finished product?
Are they?
So come one.... let's give developers a break. Next time you get annoyed about "yet another delay" stop and remember that the delay is there so that we can get a better gaming experience on release day. That can't be a bad thing.
Can it?
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
I was reading OPSM2's interview with Dave Doak (the guy who developed Goldeneye, formed Free Radical Design, and then made Timesplitters 1&2) regarding Timesplitters 2 a few nights ago.
One very interesting comment he made was how loads of fans gave Free Radical Design (Dave's company) a really hard time about not including online capabilities in this game. Comments like "Sure if you worked another 2 months on the title, it would be online capable" were made, where in reality (at least according to Dave) it would take maybe 2 more years to get a good online version up and running.
Anyway this interview brought to mind the fact that many people get very annoyed when a game gets delayed, and never stop to think about the reasons why.
I really feel that as technology progresses, and processors speed up, our tolerance for delays gets smaller and smaller!
Think back to when post was the main type of mail communication. We were happy enough to wait a few days for a letter to arrive. But now if an email or SMS text gets delayed by an hour or so we usually get very annoyed.
When will we ever reach the stage that we are happy with what we get?
I guess developers themselves are part of the problem. If we were never told that Timesplitters 2 would be online then we wouldn't be complaining about the fact that this feature was not included. Or if Rockstar games never told us that GTA Vice City was in development then we wouldn't get all stroppy when it got delayed a bit... and do you think that would affect its sales when it eventually gets released? No chance. So maybe too much publicity is a bad thing.
In the days of the ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64, we would buy games magazines (man I feel a bit old now) like CRASH! and ZAPP!. These magazines would tell us all about the latest games, what is in development etc. but, more often than not, anything that appeared in either magazine would be released within a week or two of publication. So we never had a long waiting period for the games we just heard about (and of course the reason for that is that games were so much smaller in those days).
Now, of course, we hear about games months (and sometimes years) in advance. This only serves to get us all excited for a while, then we get impatient, then annoyed as delays set in, then excited again (but not as much, in my opinion, since we've been waiting for so long). Then we get the game we've been waiting for and our anticipation has been built up so much that we are usually disappointed to some extent with the end product. Are we ever happy? (Look at the amount of posts at the moment saying what should be included in GTA Vice City.... do you really think anything new could possibly get included now? Not a hope I'm afraid... so I can guarantee you that people will straight away pick holes in this (sure to be a classic) game once it is released next month).
Saddest of all cases is when game sellers, like SR and any others, get stick for games being late. Yes, I have seen it happen, and to be honest it is a ridiculous.
I think we really need to be more patient with developers and delays. Just consider what steps are involved in getting a game developed.
Obviously if a developer falls down or neglects any of these stages then chances are their game will not be great, but if they do follow these steps (or a similar design process) properly then it is obvious that there are many areas where delays can take place.
Don't get me wrong, I hate delays too, but I can understand the reasons why they happen.
What I am trying to highlight is how, in any phase of a games development, things can go wrong and introduce delays - but that if these issues are not addressed, or enough effort is not put into any of the stages, then a substandard game will be the result (the steps here are simplified so as not to bore you too much!) (Note this is my guess at how a game gets developed, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong):
Choosing a topic, story, and goal for the game
------------------------------------------------------------
It is critical to have a good idea for a game and a decent storyline (if the game requires it). The goal of a game must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will draw out of its audience.
If the time spent during this phase of game development is cut short, in order to meet a planned deadline (remember each phase of any design has its own deadlines), then a substandard game idea will be born. This is obviously a bad start for any game trying to make it in today's competitive market. Just look at the amount of posts on this forum about crap storylines.
Research and preparation
----------------------------------------------
With the storyline and goal worked out to a basic level, it is time to go and research the idea. This means getting feedback from the public through magazines, the web, and just plain talking to gamers.
How many times have you seen a brief description of a game appearing in a magazine, only to disappear after a few months and reappear with a completely different concept? That has to happen due to negative feedback from the press and public (in a lot of cases).
Cutting corners in this phase means that the developer isn't taking the time to listen to what the gamers want, and many many clever ideas for games just get dropped.
Look how long Rockstar spent getting ideas for GTA Vice City, yes the game was delayed a bit, but will it be worth it.... Of course it will!
Another important aspect of this phase is producing a prototype or storyboards of the game, so that the developer can show it to publishers and get sponsorship to go ahead and design the game. It saddens me to think of how many great games could have been developed if the designers just spent more time on the promotional side of things in order to win good sponsorship deals.
Design Phase
-------------------------------
Now it is time to get down to the real game design. There are three main aspects to a game that must be considered. The I/O (input/output) structure, the Game structure, and the Program structure.
- I/O structure: This deals with how we as players relate to the game, and how the game relates to us.
Input deals with how the game is to be controlled. What button configurations are best suited to the game at hand. Will analogue techniques be used, and how?
It also must detail every Analogue/Digital controller movement and button press (and combinations of these) and assign some meaning to it in terms of what happens in the game.
Output deals with how the game tells us what is going on... i.e. what graphical indications on screen that tell us what to do (i.e. like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time... the blue button changes functions depending on where the game character is.... crawl into hole... open door... etc.). How many times have you bought a game with a terrible controller setup? Or how many times have you spent trying to figure out how to interact with some parts of the environment in a game?
Also output will determine how the game will look to the user (I'm sure I don't need to explain how important that is). Without the correct amount of time spent on this aspect, the game becomes a burden to play.
Also sound is a major aspect of this design phase.... Voice acting, special effects, musical score.... Again, all critical components.
- Game structure: This is the part of design that lays out the game environment and objects (trees, characters, guns ... everything) and describes how each interacts and behaves. Imagine if Konami didn't give developers enough time to spend on this for MGS2. Many of the details (e.g. shooting ice-cubes) would be missed, and the interaction with the environment would become inconsistent (which I know annoys a lot of people, judging to the recent posts about realism).
Obviously cutting corners at this point will cause flaws in the game, and would give us a less than credible game world to play in.
- Program structure: This is the nuts and bolts of the design. What languages to program in, how to allocate memory in the most efficient way and so on. The more time spent here, the less we gamers need to worry about framerate drops, glitching, long loading times, and the numerous other faults we find in games many many times.
Of course everything in these design stages must be documented very carefully and intricately, and, funnily enough, this takes more time. Without good documentation it is hard to determine why decisions were made, and what the thinking was behind various design aspects.
Design evaluation
--------------------------
Once the development team is satisfied that each of the stages above are complete and that they are compatible with each other, the next stop in the design phase is to evaluate the overall design for the most common design flaws that plague games.
The first thing to determine is whether or not the proposed design meets the overall goal of the game. If a designed game looks like it will not excite / scare / upset / or whatever the player then something has gone wrong, and time needs to be spent to sort this out.
Also the design documentation should give a good indication of whether or not the game will be stable once developed. I personally have seen many games crash or just stop dead in the middle of gameplay... for no apparent reason.
Also, at this point a decision can be made on whether the game actually gets developed or not.
Pre-programming phase
--------------------------------
Once the game is ready to go, care and attention (and, wait for it...... TIME!!) is needed to fully document how the game is to be programmed. Mistakes or rush jobs at this point will introduce faults that could possibly slip through the testing phase.
Programming
-------------------
Believe it or not, this is often said to be the easiest part of any design project. With a good quality of input documentation available, an experienced programmer should not have too much trouble actually programming the software. That being said this is a lengthy and intricate process in itself. Also this part of the design is often not allocated enough development time, with designers working crazy hours to meet the programming deadlines.
Playtesting
-----------------
Presumably every gamer dreams of this as their uber-job at some stage in life (I know I did, and sometimes still do!), but if you consider what a tester has to actually do, then the picture is not so glamorous or fun.
Imagine having to play a game repeatedly, trying out every possible combination of events... moving the character to a certain position... checking nothing happens... moving to another sightly different position.... checking again... and again... and again... and ..... you get the picture.
Any problems found at this stage need to be fixed, and that can often mean a major re-design of the game.
Skipping on testing at all will leave the gamer with a potentially glitch-ridden piece of software that will only flop when it hits the shops.
Post mortem
------------------
Just for completeness it should be mentioned that developers will always have a post mortem on any game that is produced... just to see what people think and to generate ideas for improvements in future versions / sequels of the game or in new games.
This is when developers get to see all their hard work and efforts smashed (often enough deservedly so for not making enough of an effort in game development)or praised by the critics.
By now it should be obvious that a great deal of effort and time is needed to design any game (and I didn't bother to go into the effort needed for package design, instructions, censor certification etc etc.) Any developer worth their salt will delay a game until they are happy that it really can't get any better. Which is why we always get game delays.
On the other side of the coin, some developers push games out very quickly just to generate revenue. And these titles are very often of substandard quality. This to me is just plain stupidity on the side of the developers. How can they expect their games (and also themselves) to gain the respect they need in order to make it big if they don't put the effort in to them?
It baffles me to think of a game developer producing a low quality game (Army Men games being a case in point) and looking at it before release day, and saying "Yes, that is ready to be put out on the market".... surely they are not happy with the finished product?
Are they?
So come one.... let's give developers a break. Next time you get annoyed about "yet another delay" stop and remember that the delay is there so that we can get a better gaming experience on release day. That can't be a bad thing.
Can it?
One very interesting comment he made was how loads of fans gave Free Radical Design (Dave's company) a really hard time about not including online capabilities in this game. Comments like "Sure if you worked another 2 months on the title, it would be online capable" were made, where in reality (at least according to Dave) it would take maybe 2 more years to get a good online version up and running.
Anyway this interview brought to mind the fact that many people get very annoyed when a game gets delayed, and never stop to think about the reasons why.
I really feel that as technology progresses, and processors speed up, our tolerance for delays gets smaller and smaller!
Think back to when post was the main type of mail communication. We were happy enough to wait a few days for a letter to arrive. But now if an email or SMS text gets delayed by an hour or so we usually get very annoyed.
When will we ever reach the stage that we are happy with what we get?
I guess developers themselves are part of the problem. If we were never told that Timesplitters 2 would be online then we wouldn't be complaining about the fact that this feature was not included. Or if Rockstar games never told us that GTA Vice City was in development then we wouldn't get all stroppy when it got delayed a bit... and do you think that would affect its sales when it eventually gets released? No chance. So maybe too much publicity is a bad thing.
In the days of the ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64, we would buy games magazines (man I feel a bit old now) like CRASH! and ZAPP!. These magazines would tell us all about the latest games, what is in development etc. but, more often than not, anything that appeared in either magazine would be released within a week or two of publication. So we never had a long waiting period for the games we just heard about (and of course the reason for that is that games were so much smaller in those days).
Now, of course, we hear about games months (and sometimes years) in advance. This only serves to get us all excited for a while, then we get impatient, then annoyed as delays set in, then excited again (but not as much, in my opinion, since we've been waiting for so long). Then we get the game we've been waiting for and our anticipation has been built up so much that we are usually disappointed to some extent with the end product. Are we ever happy? (Look at the amount of posts at the moment saying what should be included in GTA Vice City.... do you really think anything new could possibly get included now? Not a hope I'm afraid... so I can guarantee you that people will straight away pick holes in this (sure to be a classic) game once it is released next month).
Saddest of all cases is when game sellers, like SR and any others, get stick for games being late. Yes, I have seen it happen, and to be honest it is a ridiculous.
I think we really need to be more patient with developers and delays. Just consider what steps are involved in getting a game developed.
Obviously if a developer falls down or neglects any of these stages then chances are their game will not be great, but if they do follow these steps (or a similar design process) properly then it is obvious that there are many areas where delays can take place.
Don't get me wrong, I hate delays too, but I can understand the reasons why they happen.
What I am trying to highlight is how, in any phase of a games development, things can go wrong and introduce delays - but that if these issues are not addressed, or enough effort is not put into any of the stages, then a substandard game will be the result (the steps here are simplified so as not to bore you too much!) (Note this is my guess at how a game gets developed, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong):
Choosing a topic, story, and goal for the game
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It is critical to have a good idea for a game and a decent storyline (if the game requires it). The goal of a game must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will draw out of its audience.
If the time spent during this phase of game development is cut short, in order to meet a planned deadline (remember each phase of any design has its own deadlines), then a substandard game idea will be born. This is obviously a bad start for any game trying to make it in today's competitive market. Just look at the amount of posts on this forum about crap storylines.
Research and preparation
----------------------------------------------
With the storyline and goal worked out to a basic level, it is time to go and research the idea. This means getting feedback from the public through magazines, the web, and just plain talking to gamers.
How many times have you seen a brief description of a game appearing in a magazine, only to disappear after a few months and reappear with a completely different concept? That has to happen due to negative feedback from the press and public (in a lot of cases).
Cutting corners in this phase means that the developer isn't taking the time to listen to what the gamers want, and many many clever ideas for games just get dropped.
Look how long Rockstar spent getting ideas for GTA Vice City, yes the game was delayed a bit, but will it be worth it.... Of course it will!
Another important aspect of this phase is producing a prototype or storyboards of the game, so that the developer can show it to publishers and get sponsorship to go ahead and design the game. It saddens me to think of how many great games could have been developed if the designers just spent more time on the promotional side of things in order to win good sponsorship deals.
Design Phase
-------------------------------
Now it is time to get down to the real game design. There are three main aspects to a game that must be considered. The I/O (input/output) structure, the Game structure, and the Program structure.
- I/O structure: This deals with how we as players relate to the game, and how the game relates to us.
Input deals with how the game is to be controlled. What button configurations are best suited to the game at hand. Will analogue techniques be used, and how?
It also must detail every Analogue/Digital controller movement and button press (and combinations of these) and assign some meaning to it in terms of what happens in the game.
Output deals with how the game tells us what is going on... i.e. what graphical indications on screen that tell us what to do (i.e. like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time... the blue button changes functions depending on where the game character is.... crawl into hole... open door... etc.). How many times have you bought a game with a terrible controller setup? Or how many times have you spent trying to figure out how to interact with some parts of the environment in a game?
Also output will determine how the game will look to the user (I'm sure I don't need to explain how important that is). Without the correct amount of time spent on this aspect, the game becomes a burden to play.
Also sound is a major aspect of this design phase.... Voice acting, special effects, musical score.... Again, all critical components.
- Game structure: This is the part of design that lays out the game environment and objects (trees, characters, guns ... everything) and describes how each interacts and behaves. Imagine if Konami didn't give developers enough time to spend on this for MGS2. Many of the details (e.g. shooting ice-cubes) would be missed, and the interaction with the environment would become inconsistent (which I know annoys a lot of people, judging to the recent posts about realism).
Obviously cutting corners at this point will cause flaws in the game, and would give us a less than credible game world to play in.
- Program structure: This is the nuts and bolts of the design. What languages to program in, how to allocate memory in the most efficient way and so on. The more time spent here, the less we gamers need to worry about framerate drops, glitching, long loading times, and the numerous other faults we find in games many many times.
Of course everything in these design stages must be documented very carefully and intricately, and, funnily enough, this takes more time. Without good documentation it is hard to determine why decisions were made, and what the thinking was behind various design aspects.
Design evaluation
--------------------------
Once the development team is satisfied that each of the stages above are complete and that they are compatible with each other, the next stop in the design phase is to evaluate the overall design for the most common design flaws that plague games.
The first thing to determine is whether or not the proposed design meets the overall goal of the game. If a designed game looks like it will not excite / scare / upset / or whatever the player then something has gone wrong, and time needs to be spent to sort this out.
Also the design documentation should give a good indication of whether or not the game will be stable once developed. I personally have seen many games crash or just stop dead in the middle of gameplay... for no apparent reason.
Also, at this point a decision can be made on whether the game actually gets developed or not.
Pre-programming phase
--------------------------------
Once the game is ready to go, care and attention (and, wait for it...... TIME!!) is needed to fully document how the game is to be programmed. Mistakes or rush jobs at this point will introduce faults that could possibly slip through the testing phase.
Programming
-------------------
Believe it or not, this is often said to be the easiest part of any design project. With a good quality of input documentation available, an experienced programmer should not have too much trouble actually programming the software. That being said this is a lengthy and intricate process in itself. Also this part of the design is often not allocated enough development time, with designers working crazy hours to meet the programming deadlines.
Playtesting
-----------------
Presumably every gamer dreams of this as their uber-job at some stage in life (I know I did, and sometimes still do!), but if you consider what a tester has to actually do, then the picture is not so glamorous or fun.
Imagine having to play a game repeatedly, trying out every possible combination of events... moving the character to a certain position... checking nothing happens... moving to another sightly different position.... checking again... and again... and again... and ..... you get the picture.
Any problems found at this stage need to be fixed, and that can often mean a major re-design of the game.
Skipping on testing at all will leave the gamer with a potentially glitch-ridden piece of software that will only flop when it hits the shops.
Post mortem
------------------
Just for completeness it should be mentioned that developers will always have a post mortem on any game that is produced... just to see what people think and to generate ideas for improvements in future versions / sequels of the game or in new games.
This is when developers get to see all their hard work and efforts smashed (often enough deservedly so for not making enough of an effort in game development)or praised by the critics.
By now it should be obvious that a great deal of effort and time is needed to design any game (and I didn't bother to go into the effort needed for package design, instructions, censor certification etc etc.) Any developer worth their salt will delay a game until they are happy that it really can't get any better. Which is why we always get game delays.
On the other side of the coin, some developers push games out very quickly just to generate revenue. And these titles are very often of substandard quality. This to me is just plain stupidity on the side of the developers. How can they expect their games (and also themselves) to gain the respect they need in order to make it big if they don't put the effort in to them?
It baffles me to think of a game developer producing a low quality game (Army Men games being a case in point) and looking at it before release day, and saying "Yes, that is ready to be put out on the market".... surely they are not happy with the finished product?
Are they?
So come one.... let's give developers a break. Next time you get annoyed about "yet another delay" stop and remember that the delay is there so that we can get a better gaming experience on release day. That can't be a bad thing.
Can it?