Things that might make game developers go berserk

Game developing is a tedious process. In fact a great deal of time and interdisciplinary approach has been to make a single game. It also requires serious amount of planning and design. As time goes, the mechanism in game are getting complex with complex situations and scenarios. Much of the game development is put on design, artwork and story. I will leave the programming part in this discussion for the time being. During the 80s, it was enough to make games simple. Now in 2010, we can see majority of games are not simple at all. Sometimes games are made as twisted, complex and mind blowing as possible just to meet gamer’s expectation. Imagine after 10 years, game making is going to be so much complicated that it could make developers act like crybabies. In this blog, I will mention some of the factors that can make developers whine for days or months.

 

1. Multiple combination factors

 

I will just take only one series as an example: the infamous Mass Effect series. In Mass Effect II, the events take place according to how the player progresses through Mass Effect I. The player can also start the game with pre made history without taking any history profile from Mass Effect I. Events will chase based on whether the player saved someone or took this path or that path or had romance with someone (I wish I had my character Shephard romance Ashley. Why? I will tell the reason in a moment). So in this case there are I think 100 variables that are needed to be put. In Mass Effect III, it is said that already 1000 variables have been put just to accommodate the events that took place in ME and MEII. That also includes whether you saved someone from ME (Ashley, Kaiden or even the Rachni Queen). Off topic: When I first saw Ashley in Game Informer magazine, I was stunned. She is mad hot. You got the reason now. So think about this. If there were any ME4, 5, 6, 7 and so on following the same formula, then how many variables are needed to be put. In my software engineering class I learned how to estimate combinations or test cases, which is multiplying the variables to get the final combinations. So suppose ME had 10, ME2 had 100, ME3 had 1000 (making it simple), ME4 will have 10000 (I don’t want to continue). If we multiply all these variables to form how many combinations or decisions are possible, then the result will be just a simple number: 10000000000. It is so simple that it may even make a developer commit suicide.

 

2. Multiple DVDs

 

If we take an example from L.A. Noire, it Is being said there are 20 hours of voice acting. It will be released in 3 DVDs. In past we had Final Fantasy XIII having 3 DVDs and the highest I can recall is Final Fantasy VIII with 4 CDs. After 10 years (considering Moore’s law and how technology is exponentially growing), we might end up having 10 Blu Rays in one case. Is it enough to make developers think like crazy about the fact how they can break all these up and fit into these media, or even sell a single game worth 59 bucks in the market with 10 medias inside.

 

3. Detail

 

Speaking of that 20 hours voice acting, in 10 years from now we might even get 200 hours of voice acting or even more. It will be one hell of job for an audio producer (being a music producer myself, I know how painful recording a single audio can be).  L.A. Noire character and facial animation were captured with 32 cameras. There might be a time even a movement in our blood veins will be captured and there will be like 1000 cameras to deal with it. Working perfectly on a single detail is not a matter of joke. I remember watching a behind the scenes footage of the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie and how Squaresoft spent hours just to create the effect on the iris of the eye. To make matters worse how about putting a bullet time camera and record exact path of the bullets travelling just to add details in any upcoming Call of Duty game. To make even worse, how about you put a volunteer to dodge bullets (Be Neo of Matrix) so the developers can take exact dodging footage and the facial reaction too (of course he will sign a paper before that).

 

4. Story

 

In game development storyboarding is done frequently and flowcharts and trees are made to link characters, events, effects and progression. It is wise to say for both Mass Effect and Assassins Creed series, a great of storyboarding has been done. Ten years from now, considering if there are 10-15 medias for one game, how big the story is going to be and how the stories and scripts will be organized. Organizing such a huge stories with dialogs, actions and events needs massive amount of time and brainpower to cope up with the story building. It is possible that such story when all its features are combines together may form a book with 5000-6000 pages in total. What makes matters even worse is the maintenance of keeping the story goes with the flow. Right now we have so many twists in the game to keep the gamers surprised.

 

5. Testing

 

Every successful software or games involves a serious dedication and time to test the whole game. It can be requirement testing, bug testing, documentation testing, stress testing, and usability testing and so on. It could be disastrous if the game or software is buggy since it can bring credibility into question and no one would like to have an overly buggy game. It is safe to say that not a simple game is 100% bug free. Even testing small software takes quite a bit of time. Due to big nature of game programming, testing is the hardest, especially when you are making games for 360 and PS3 (since 360 and PS3 users do not get the offer of patches). Imagine in future, bigger concepts are made. If the games are made in the future with huge content, enough to fit in 5-6 DVDs the testing of all possible combination (remember the simple number?) and documenting the result could be something everyone should avoid except robots, cause removing each and every one of them will be enough to put them back to the street. As I said 100% bug free testing is hardly possible.

 

These are the primary factors the developers are quite worried about. Such massive mind blowing processes may at one point end up making everyone lost, demotivation of the developers or get them out of track. Some may even lose track of things to do and approach of such big processes. In Software Engineering it is always advised to make the software design as simple is possible. The longer the design, the greater is cyclomatic complexity of the software (which is bad news). Still the developers initiate the approach. It’s a personal challenge and they need to meet customer demands in order put stance in gaming business.