Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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During development you
ll want the convenience of having all the platforms side-
by-side, which keeps you from making tons of copies of the common files for every
platform. You
ll need to make a small change to your deployment script, in order to
strip unwanted platform files from platform-specific builds, such as those that would
get burned to an installation disk. After all, there
'
'
s no reason to have a Win32 ver-
sion of your game on the Wii, is there?
In comparing game development with other kinds of software development projects,
what really stands out is the sheer number of parts required. Even for a small game,
you may have many tens of thousands of source files for code, sound, art, world lay-
out, scripts, and more. You may also have to cook files for your game engine or plat-
form. Most sound effects come from a source WAV and are usually converted to
OGG or MP3. Textures may have a source PSD if they were created in Photoshop
and have a companion JPG or PNG after it
s been flattened and compressed. Models
have a MAX file (if you use 3ds Max) and have multiple source textures. You might
also have HTML files for online help or strategy guides. The list goes on and on.
Even small games have hundreds, if not thousands, of individual files that all have
to be created, checked, fixed, rechecked, tracked, and installed into the game. Big
games will frequently have hundreds of thousands of files, or even millions
Back in the old days, the source files for a big project were typically spread all over
the place. Some files were stored on a network (if you knew where to look), but most
were scattered in various places on desktop computers, never to be seen again after
the project finished. Unfortunately, these files were frequently lost or destroyed while
the project was in production. The artist or programmer would have to grudgingly
re-create his work, a hateful task at best.
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The Flame
When I first arrived at Origin Systems, I noticed some odd labels taped to
people
'
s monitors. One said,
“
The Flame of the Map
”
and another
“
The
Flame of Conversation.
s version of
Employee of the Month, but I was wrong. This was source control
”
I thought these phrases were Origin
'
in the
days of
t even have a local area network.
If someone wanted to work on something, he physically walked to the
machine that was the
“
sneaker net,
”
when Origin didn
'
and copied the relevant
files onto a floppy disk, stole the flame label, and went back to his
machine. Then he became the
“
Flame of Such and Such
”
When a build was assembled for
QA, everyone carried his floppy disks to the build computer and copied all
the flames to one place. Believe it or not, this system worked fairly well.
“
Flame.
”
