Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Brave Executioner
The game world of The Sims Medieval has a big pit right in the middle of it
where a horrible tentacled beast lives. If you
ve ever seen Return of the Jedi,
you may remember the Sarlacc pit. The idea is basically the same. One of the
things a hero Sim can do is jump in the pit and fight the beast. If he succeeds,
he gets something special. If he fails, he dies.
'
There was a bug on The Sims Medieval that read something like this:
I was
watching the executioner feed the pit beast when all of a sudden she just leapt
into the pit! I couldn
“
There was a video attached that showed
the executioner diving into the pit. The designers saw this video and loved it,
so they asked us to figure out why the executioner was choosing to do this
action and to turn it into a feature.
'
t reproduce it.
”
I
m trying my very best to give you some solid advice instead of some wishy-washy
pabulum. The truth is there
'
s no right answer regarding last-minute changes to your
game. The only thing you can count on is 20-20 hindsight, and only the people that
write the history topics are the winners. In other words, when you are faced with a
decision to make a big change late in the game, trust your experience, try to be at
least a little bit conservative and responsible in your choices, and hope like hell that
you are right.
'
Let the Team Vote on Bugs
On Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars, we did something unusual. We had
already established a
room where all the team leads could
discuss each bug as it came in from the testing team and either kill it or
assign it to someone. A few weeks before we went into total lockdown
mode, we gathered a list of 100 bugs that the team really wanted to see
fixed and let the entire team vote on them. This took a few rounds, but it
was great to see things that were close to a developer
“
Bug Triage
”
'
s heart get fixed. We
'
ll
do this again.
Murphy is alive and well in the computer game industry, and I
s been an
invisible team member on most of my projects. At Origin Systems, I think Murphy
had a corner office. I think his office was nicer than mine!
Big trouble on game projects comes in a few flavors: too much work and too little
time, human beings under too much pressure, competing products in the target mar-
ket, and dead-ends. There aren
'
t necessarily standard solutions for these problems,
but I can tell you what has been tried and how well it worked or didn
'
m sure he
'
'
t work, as
the case may be.
