How Not To Make An MMOG 65
garylian writes "Some of the folks here might remember a Massive game called 'Mourning' that went into development and never really went anywhere. Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete. Some former fans have a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Highlights from the article include the fact that one of the game backers was a internet porn-lord!" From the article:"The game was going nowhere, no one really believed in its success. We all knew it was going to fail, but we were kind of reluctant in admiting it. Those who realized this and had better opportunities, left. Those who were blinded by different reasons or had no other choices, remained till the end (or maybe had different reasons.) It's not that we didn't try to change this direction the game was heading to... We did, but no one was listening to us. " The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt.
How to fail anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
Re:Grain of Salt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interview? (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's what made it such an interesting read. It almost reads well enough to be fiction. You come away from it with a good sense of the main players (Dave, Ego, Ado) and can identify those people with others you may know. And Ado getting punched in the face.... he so had that coming.
Questions seemeed to go in circles, but it was an amusing read, especially for those with appreciation for software and especially game development.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your boss can't treat you with respect, it's an indicator of other issues that they have that are likley to destroy any chances you have of successful completion of any project. If you ever have the opportunity to see a company with a design team run like this side by side with one where the boss respects their employees, you can see that the difference is night and day.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Insightful)
The answers of the "single" employee being intereviewed are interesting in that their English is significantly better in the first few answers.
Then, look at how they address a few of the questions. The questioner obviously had better contact with some of management than the interviewee. I don't care how many online forums you post in... it sounded to me like the questioner knew way too much about the situation to not have been an insider... IE, and employee at the company. I'd say that at least 3 people inside the company were involved in that interview.
As for motives... we're talking about employees who now need to find other jobs. They wouldn't want to be tied to a company that 1, bombed and 2, has a nasty scandal tied to it. I'm sure that few Enron employees are highlighting their managerial experience there. Most probably, these folks are looking for some damage control. Their story sounds fairly credible, and far from an isolated experience in this industry. I only worked as a software developer a short time (I'm doing the graduate school thing now... well, research at the moment, until I start my PhD), but I was at a contract house, so I met a lot of people.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Insightful)
From the interview is seems like not only did the "designer" fail to write things down, he also changed his opinion every other day and got into fights with the people who were now working on "wrong" things without being told that the design changed. From the article it seems like he's a sociopath (may seem like a strong term, but the basic "tell tale signs" indicate it).
People with a plan don't let programmers talk (Score:3, Insightful)
As another poster has pointed out programmers are not game designers. In other words programmers implement the game designer's ideas. The game designer should do research, or have research done for him/her. Nowhere does this indicate that programmers should interact with customers. As a programmer myself I can see what a recipe for disaster that can be.
As for your theory that programmer interaction is part of the formula for success I have a counter example: World of Warcraft. How much interaction did the customers/fans have with programmers prior to BlizzCon (a year after release?)?
As the GP was pointing out success has more to do with a plan. Good plans usually have someone other than programmers interacting with customers/fans during development. As a geek it took a while to realize this but sales, maketing, and public relations people exist for a reason. Business is a Darwinian process. If PR specialists did not help companies communicate more effectively than geeks then PR specialists would not have lasted this long. If marketing specialists (not a spin person - a create an experiment to validate designer's idea, conduct focus group, etc person) did not help companies design more desirable products than geeks then marketing specialists would not have lasted this long.
Re:People with a plan encourage staff quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer [gdmag.com]. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game" [wikipedia.org].
Summary of Interview (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:4, Insightful)
It's possible to get by without one if you're creating a relatively simple game with an extremely small tight-knit team, but otherwise you're going to need that documentation to at least make sure everyone is building the same game. Producing a coherent design on paper is hard work and may not be as fun as jumping in and starting to build the game, but it forces you to think about the consequences of each design element you add. It's much easier to change the design at this stage rather than lose 2 months of development time because something added on a whim breaks another gameplay mechanic or renders something redundant. Trust me, I've seen it happen.
Having a robust design at the start of the project doesn't mean that it won't change over time. Many features you just can't really tell how "fun" they're going to be until you try them. Having the documentation there as a foundation will allow you to make changes more easily with minimum impact on the rest of the game. We've found it easiest to use a design wiki, so that the documentation can be kept up to date without too much hassle.
I've refused to work at companies that don't put in the effort at design stage; one company told me that in games development you don't have time for design - they closed down about two months later. And from the other side of the table, candidates who don't show the necessary appreciation for design will not do favorably in interviews. Call me a design nazi if you like, but I've wasted too much of my life poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly thunk-out projects.
Re:Slashdotting them wouldn't be hard (Score:3, Insightful)