Chapter 6. Basic Design and Development Issues

"These worlds are complex, revolve around communities, and require a lot of forethought. It's no longer about, 'Wow, wouldn't it be cool if ' but rather, 'So if we put this feature in, how would it affect long- term balance? Could players abuse it?' and so on. A good, experienced development team will know where the common pitfalls lie, and what precautions to take early on in the development process. Something as simple as having adequate bandwidth and hardware on launch day is often overlooked by first-time developers."

” Daniel Manachi , The Themis Group

KEY TOPICS

• Practicalities and Advice

• Design

Online game development teams are weird. Not disturbing weird, like some guy standing on a street corner arguing macro-economics with a fire hydrant. No, it's more like the weirdness of a lovable but dotty old aunt who can immediately take over and manage the extended family when her sister has been in an accident , but has trouble in the morning remembering how to tie her shoes.

The weirdness in development teams comes from the fact that they are pie-in-the-sky creatively and down-to-earth technologically. This tends to produce an effect not dissimilar to multiple personality disorder in an individual: Personality A is the fun, creative one who can design the most complicated, elegant game ever, while Personality B is pretty no- nonsense , task-oriented , and has the nuts and bolts of coding and hardware down to a tee. The problems come in when they fight for control of the body; most times, the fun, creative personality wins out, even if the matter is something Personality B should have control over. It is the age-old conflict between the theoretical and the practical.

This conflict is not readily apparent to outside observers, but it affects everything the team does throughout the development process. Most developers, be they designers, coders, artists , or network specialists, enter the industry because making games is supposed to be a fun, creative activity. Like everything else in life, however, the nuts-and-bolts issues have to be attended to as well; as an industry, we just haven't been good enough Type-B personalities.

One of the common themes throughout this chapter is keeping the two personalities in harmony. Someone has to act as a rudder for the enormous creative energies of the team and must know when to steer them away from the theoretical and toward the practical. These energies are enormous ; you'll rarely meet a visionless, incompetent online game development team. Often, though, you will meet teams poorly steered and constantly making emergency course corrections because they forgot to plot the sandbars on the navigation chart.

Someone has to keep things in balance between what co-author Bridgette Patrovsky calls the "esoteric, dream-state BS" that teams can get lost in and the need to actually get things planned, tasked, coded, drawn, and tested . The ultimate responsibility for that falls to both the producer and project manager, the former to keep the team balanced and the latter to keep the producer informed of just what state the development is in. We discussed the project manager in previous chapters; you'll learn more about the producer later on in this chapter.

This chapter will have two focuses: the theoretical (design) and the practical (development). There is plenty of room for movement and opinion in each. Technology discussions, especially , have a tendency to appear cut and dried , and there is always the temptation for an author to lay down what appears to be hard and fast recommendations for development tools, specific languages, operating environments, and so forth. The plain fact is, this industry is still young, and while some good solutions for everyday problems do exist, every new game is different and probably will require a different solution set, especially persistent worlds (PWs).

So, to mangle an old saw, instead of trying to teach developers how to chew technical cheese, what we seek to do in this chapter is give some guidelines and let the reader know what has worked in the past with tools, design issues, and development processes, as well as what hasn't worked.

Throughout the chapters in this section, we'll make some points about console and hybrid online gaming and identify which points about PW development do and don't apply to them.