4 réponses à ce sujet

[SunTzuz]

Start on that new engine or licience a new one.
Attention to detail!  Even the smallest detail adds up.
Manage your resources! Seems like a lot of it went into cinematics and marketing.
Don't pull a ME3 (last mission); if it is not done and the deadline is looming... well, that is your decision (hopefully a good one).
Test gameplay mechanics and world (not the story).  Then test some more.  Build more test chambers.  Keep testing, use outside test subjects if necessary.
Do not call it DA3... something like Thedas or The Magisters or The Circle Revolt and in the small corner of the box art [Dragon Age]

Show, don't tell.

[Allan Schumacher]

Dakota Strider wrote...

I would like to say one thing about test subjects. Getting some from outside Bioware is a good idea. An even better idea, is to make sure you are getting people from all demographics. If you have test subjects that only have console and action game experience, you should also have players that have rpg experience going back to Baldur's Gate and beyond.

Our QA department has a wide range of people with a wide range of gaming backgrounds.  Sometimes it's good to have someone with limited gaming experience look at a user interface, for example, because it ensures that our prior experiences don't overtly bias our expectations as to whether or not it makes sense.  Sometimes it's good to have an RPG pro that's been playing for 20 years because he has seen how other games broke based on his prior experience.


In case anyone is interested, my preferred gaming platform is the PC, and I have played every BioWare game sans Shattered Steel and Jade Empire (because there was no PC version for a long time).  My work is more technical in nature (supporting the development process, tools development, pipelines, etc) but I have resolved to try to be more aware of what we're working on from a consumer perspective going forward, because I do feel I didn't do that as well on DA2 which meant by the time I was looking at some of the in game content, it was very late in development.

What this means is I jump into the shark tank and engage the fans (including the busier shark tank known as the ME3 boards... >.>) to try to get meaningful discussions and then critically think about common themes and see how they relate to the ideas we're currently milling about, look at them from a QA perspective (i.e. is there something I could do as QA to help improve the user experience as it relates to the discussion), and occasionally coalesce them and approach our senior leads (whom are so super approachable I'm still kind of surprised) and discuss how some ideas may or may not align with our goals and to create perspective on what we want to do.  I think most of this is just that I have settled into the company, now have a full game under my belt, and just feel more comfortable about the whole dev process and I do want to make a kickass game for people.

Also, as a gamer with a huge PC bias, I do actively provide feedback and questions about how features will behave for PC gamers though.  I can still kick some butt in some Batman Arkham City on the 360 though if need be.

[Allan Schumacher]

What do you mean?

I mean that I didn't spend as much time experiencing the content as I would have liked, in hindsight.  Part of this was just still being relatively new to the job, as DA2 was my first full project.

I spend a lot of time in test levels created either by myself or other people, or writing some code to help automate some of the playthrough so that content guys can get be more efficient at their jobs. I'll design and execute regression tests for the various systems to ensure that, for example, the staging system still works (do the systems the content use still work in game), does the workflow designers use still work (have we changed anything that may accidentally prevent them from adding new content on that day), and stuff like that.

I do need to have real life, in game examples that I can test on (relying only on test levels is a recipe for bad), but unfortunately I was able to get most of my coverage in that regard without going all that far into the first act of DA2. So there were large parts of the story and plot that I actually didn't have that good of an understanding of (or even know about) because they didn't directly relate back to the work that I typically dealt with.

So part of my personal goals going forward is to still keep perspective on the game we're making as a whole, which includes finding time in my work week to just playthrough content that we have and look at it not only for my specific roles, but also from a more general perspective. As someone with a CompSci background I understand the importance of iteration and if I can help detect content issues earlier in development, the cheaper and more likely those elements can continue to be iterated on.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 25 avril 2012 - 08:00 .

[John Epler]

AlexJK wrote...

byzantine horse wrote...

... would DA3 benefit from destructible environments?

Nope. Real destructible terrain pretty much requires a game built around it, and the alternative is to have certain objects or types of object be destructible, leading to "yes you can smash this box/door/wall but not this one" - which is no more or less bizarre than saying that nothing is.

Pretty much.

As soon as you bring 'destructible environments' up as a bullet point, everyone starts to imagine a magical world where they can collapse a building on top of their enemies, or take out a bridge to prevent pursuit. Battlefield 3 does it well, as does Red Faction: Guerilla (or as I like to call it, 'Red Faction: Just How Many Explosives Are Too Many'), but that's because a large part of their gameplay is focused around it.

I think the new X-Com remake is also going to have destructible terrain? Which makes sense. But as for Dragon Age, if we ever moved into that arena I doubt it'd be enough to make it a major feature.

[Allan Schumacher]

If an existing engine doesn't have features that we need for how we do our workflows and so forth, we'll need to create it from scratch. This is also what we'd need to do when creating our own engine, so there's really not any savings in that regard.

A well designed engine can be modified to add functionality and leveraged for different games without really adding extra work that would have been avoided by starting from scratch.

The Alien Swarm mod was built with Unreal Tournament 2004, and Civilization 4 and Pirates! was built on the Gamebryo engine, which was used for Elder Scroll 3/4/5 and a host of other games.