Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
reports. If you have a project team of 12 programmers, 14 artists, and 10 designers,
you
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ll have two programming leads reporting to a technical director and a similar
structure for artists and designers. You
ll likely have a project director as well, creat-
ing a project management staff of 10 people.
If your management staff is anything less than that, you
'
ll probably run into issues
like two artists working on the same model, or perhaps a programming task that
falls completely through the cracks. To be honest, even with an experienced manage-
ment team, you
'
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ll never be completely free of these issues.
Working in Parallel on
Bicycle Cards
Occasionally, you get lucky, and you can add people to a project simply
because a project is planned and organized in the right way. A good
example of this was the Bicycle Cards project, basically a bunch of little
games packaged up in one product. When some of the games began to run
behind schedule, we hired two contractors to take on a few games apiece. The
development went completely smoothly with seven programmers in parallel.
Their work was compartmentalized, communication of their tasks was
covered nearly 100 percent by the design document, and this helped ease
any problems.
They say that nine women can
s true. There is also
a documented case of a huge group of people who built an entire house from the
ground up in three days due to an intricately coordinated plan, extremely skilled peo-
ple, and very specialized building techniques. Your project could exist on either side
of these extremes.
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t make a baby in one month. That
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Slipping the Schedule
This solution seems de rigueur in the games industry, even with a coordinated appli-
cation of crunch mode and bloating the team. There
s a great poster of Ultima VII
and Strike Commander that Origin published in 1992, in the style of movie posters
that bragged
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“
Coming this Christmas.
”
It turns out that those posters got the season
right, but they just had the wrong year.
There
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s a long list of games that shipped before their time, but perhaps the worst
offender in my personal history was Ultima Online. There was even a lawsuit to
that effect, where some subscribers filed a class action lawsuit against Electronic
Arts for shipping a game that wasn
t ready. Thankfully, it was thrown out of court.
A case like that could have had drastic effects on the industry!
The pressure to ship on schedule is enormous. You might think that companies want
to ship on time because of the additional costs of the development team, and while
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