Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
100
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
lost, and local rotation axes on joints (joint position information for motion) are ruined.
This adds up to a frustrating situation for the team as a whole.
Similarly, once actors can be loaded reliably into the game scene, if there is no
powerful camera-tuning system, you cannot make game-dependent edits to camera
moves. You need to be able to edit and refine camera moves by some pathway in the
game engine in order to build up the kind of gameplay your team has as a goal.
This “challenge point” in game development highlights again the importance of
powerful tool development. It is an area virtually every developer struggles with—
large or small.
Planning and considering carefully your tool development choices is absolutely
critical in building exciting and competitive games for today’s gaming market. Although
the scope and complexity of game titles continue to ascend, the amount of
time to delivery and budget support have leveled off or even diminished in many
cases. As a result, developers need construction tools of incredible power and diversity.
You can already see that this idea is becoming a development reality, as many
game developers now specialize in a certain game genre (sports, RPGs, RTS,
first-person, and so forth). It’s becoming quite difficult to jump genre because of the
unique development requirements (technology support down to tool specifics) for
each genre.
INTERVIEW WITH NATHAN HUNT
Nathan Hunt is a lead engine programmer at The Collective, developers of highly acclaimed titles like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb for Xbox. His past game credits
include Virtual Pool 2 and Virtual Pool 3, among others. Currently, he is hard at work building game
technology for next-generation game consoles. He earned a B.S. in computer science from UCLA.
TM: Hello Nathan! Can you briefly describe your role as lead engine programmer?
NH: My role is to co-supervise and manage a multiplatform, multigame game tools and technology
code base and help oversee a department of more than 20 engineers. This involves technical design,
coding and maintenance of many core technology systems, and, from a management capacity, helping
to ensure that our games are shipped in a reasonable time frame and with a competitive feature set.
TM: Full-time “game design” oriented positions are relatively new in the industry. In terms of
workflow, how can designers best collaborate with programmers and technical leads?
NH: One of the key ingredients to creating a successful game is effective communication between
the game designers and programmers. The most important factor to achieving this is for the design
department to make sure they have a decisive, unchanging vision for the game in its entirety. Another
key element is that designers must be able to provide low-level, functionality-driven documentation to
the programming staff upon demand—documentation that is vague or subject to interpretation is very
likely to be either implemented wrong the first time or be road-blocked before implementation can
even begin due to lack of information. Finally, a designer has to be willing to compromise. A designer
may be “perfect” when implemented to a spec, but when the technology development time could be
halved while losing only 10 percent of the coolness factor, this is often a trade worth making.