Game Development Cost

    I'm pretty sure they tried to plan every possible detail before starting production, because no one wants lose ends in a multi million dollar project. But the creative side of making games isn't a science. Something may look incredible fun on paper and later the players don't understand it or don't find a piece of fun. Or someone may come with a genius idea in later stages. In the end I think common sense dictates what to do. I doubt HL2 would be the same game without the gravity gun.

    However I agree such decisions are quite risky and if you aren't Valve probably will derail most game companies

    I'm pretty sure the bulk of the time was trying to force the engine to do vehicles and outdoor environments but yes I openly expressed suprise when i heard it.

    Design is an iterative process, something like 80% of the work in design you do will be redone, that's partly why everyone thinks they are a designer, an till they get fustrated by the process. It's the same when writing a book, movie script or interface design for a mobile phone. You only have to take a look at all the best games of the last few years, the best results come from big changes in development and being able to accept mistakes and learn from them. Bioshock is a good example of that, there are some articles talking about the problems they had.

    The day games can be made with ease and no loss i'll gobble my own penis, if you think games are bad take a look at the movie industry a little deeper, then consider how refined that should be.

    It's super easy to crticize a company that you do not work for about a project they did that you didn't work on. People are human, and not everything goes to plan. Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a game's development process is to stop the bad direction it's going in and redesign it based on a new technology, new/better vision or other factors that are impossible to predict. Not always, but sometimes.

    Notice how easy it is to look at developers in hindsight and say "they are idiots" or "they should not have taken as long as they did" or "I bet they lost money" etc. I'm not saying mistakes don't get made and bad management doesn't get in the way. It's just that no one person or team has infinite wisdom and foresight to see all ends of a production process. Even well conceived, carefully planned projects go astray. Nothing is a sure thing in this industry so notice how quick we are to criticize. Could many projects have gone better if everyone was better aligned from the beginning? Of course. I deal with that all the time. But game developers and pulishers (and even the suits) are human beings. Expressing outrage in hindsight is generally useless. Instead, look for what you have to learn from the situation and move on. That's it.

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    I'm pretty sure they tried to plan every possible detail before starting production, because no one wants lose ends in a multi million dollar project. But the creative side of making games isn't a science.

    I think this is a good point. The games industry is young and immature compared to a lot of business types so certain stuff is sub-par but it's very true that making something fun is somewhat intangible. If you spend ages working on something that is threatening to click but never quite does, at what point do you recognise the fact that it's a bit lacking and it's never quite going to work? I think everyone knows how gut-wrenching it is to work on some aspect of your design (be it a level, an application or a texture set etc.) only to realise that it's just not the right way to do it, or that you have figured out a much better way to go about it.

    If someone asks me to write a tool to do tasks x, y and z, then that's fine. Chuck it in a requirements document and then let me at it. However, if someone wants some fun gameplay, that's a bit looser. There's more things that can go wrong.

    As for where the money goes: Just take a look around at a large developer. There's a lot of staff, hardware, software, facilities etc. to be paid for. The bigger the company gets, the more people have to be paid to manage the people that make stuff. It's pretty much inevitable. Like anything, as people do this more and more and gain more experience (assuming the experienced staff are retained), companies will likely become better at managing projects. In the space of a couple of decades, we've gone from bedroom programmers (who also did the art & levels) to 100+ man teams working on blockbusters. Is anyone surprised that things sometimes go awry?

    It is very much like the film industry imo -- a script can look great, you can cast all of the right people and a great director etc. but it can all go pear-shaped because it's not like we're making Generic Spreadsheet Package 8b.

    Quote from zaphod

    if there is one thing my time in the game industry has seared permanently into the gray tissue of my brain, it is this statement.

    zaphod wins

    Yes some things are hard to predict and must be redone BUT there is a difference. For example HL2 grav gun at the end of the game: did you really needed to test that first before you can figure out "oh jeez, maybe its more fun if we introduce the more revolutionary aspects of the gameplay earlier on in the game, since few people play a game until the end". Thats not rocket science to figure out, you dont even need to test that, but these kind of mistakes happen _ALL_ the time.

    Also, yes brand new gameplay elements may be difficult to design and implement, so for example for HL2, they prolly didnt had a clear idea in the beginning how the gameplay would be influenced by this grav gun, which is normal, but cant you make some low poly maps first then? And focus on finishing the other more standards levels first while the experimental levels are further redesigned? So you dont have to redo an entire level later on, but just the low poly mockup...

    The fact that new gameplay elements are difficult to predict is no excuse for redoing half a game. You got low poly testlevels to test things out in.

    And actually I have seen a lot of studios who did wish to lose ends in a multi mil dollar project. Look past the bigger studios who usually do have their things going pretty okish, and look at the smaller studios who often, for example because of the lack of experience, mess things up quicker... Exceptions aside of course.

    The fact that this is a young industry, and a rapidly expanding industry isnt helping. I sometimes feel that lots of people are still stuck in the mindset of a few years ago, when things were easier to redo, and less costly, and havent fully realized yet that the old more random design approach is starting to become really expensive... It is slowly improving though.

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    I think everyone knows how gut-wrenching it is to work on some aspect of your design (be it a level, an application or a texture set etc.) only to realise that it's just not the right way to do it, or that you have figured out a much better way to go about it.

    Then why did you already started on producing it? What happened to the research stage? Maybe it wasn't your fault and should your superiors and more experienced colleagues have guided you through the process better? Maybe you needed to have more meetings to discuss the challenging parts of the thing to make? All in all, this is something that can be avoided for about 95 percent of everything that is made.

    Quote from Hourences

    I sometimes feel that lots of people are still stuck in the mindset of a few years ago, when things were easier to redo, and less costly, and havent fully realized yet that the old more random design approach is starting to become really expensive...

    It's only expensive if you have a big studio that is burning tons of cash for every moment wasted. There are still plenty of opportunities to take a much more organic and evolutionary design approach with small team projects. TF2 had a very evolutionary design, was re-started numerous times, but they didn't lose a ton of money becuase there was only a handful of people working on evolving the deign until they found something they wanted to go to full production on.

    Quote from Defrag

    I think this is a good point. The games industry is young and immature compared to a lot of business's

    I don't think we can go on saying that for much longer.

    I think the issue is not that much that it is young, it is that it is evolving at the pace of technology - similar or even faster than the music and film industry.

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    Then why did you already started on producing it? What happened to the research stage? Maybe it wasn't your fault and should your superiors and more experienced colleagues have guided you through the process better? Maybe you needed to have more meetings to discuss the challenging parts of the thing to make? All in all, this is something that can be avoided for about 95 percent of everything that is made.

    I'm not talking personally about something I've done (I work in QA doing unit testing & tools, so I generally don't do the 'fun' stuff ). Basically what I meant is that you might prototype something and it looked good, but it ultimately ended up not panning out as expected. At what point do you give up on it, cut your losses and redo the work? In amateur stuff it's fine(ish) because nobody is paying us... In companies there's a bunch of publisher type people jabbing pens at you and pointing at deadlines

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