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Games Entertainment

Postmortem on a Student Project 35

Posted by Zonk from the reaching-for-better-things dept.
Gamasutra continues to expand their coverage of student game design programs, with a postmortem on the student project Insignia. A group of six students spent most of a year working on an RPG/RTS hybrid using the d20 license from Wizards of the Coast. From the entertaining writeup: "The process of pitching our idea was highly informative and gave us an industry perspective, insight and positive feedback from the judges. The pressure of competition also helped really focus the team's efforts rather than the more nebulous approach of most student projects."
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Postmortem on a Student Project More

Postmortem on a Student Project

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  • Related Stories (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by kevmo ( 243736 )
    Is this feature new?

  • So they failed... (Score:3, Informative)

    by dyslexicbunny ( 940925 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @12:37PM (#14716626)
    but that shouldn't stop them.

    Perhaps they should pitch the game idea to some companies. It sounds like a cool enough concept, especially with an industry that's lacking creativity these days.

    Granted, I would have thought that modding the Neverwinter engine would have been easier than the Unreal engine for what they were doing. But I wouldn't know. Would creating the content and effects in NW be all that hard/involved?
    • Naw, it would look too much like Warcraft. I'd like to see a RPG/FPS hybrid, and no, I don't mean putting a lame fantasy skin on an existing engine like Heretic.

    • Re:So they failed... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Surt ( 22457 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:00PM (#14717362) Homepage Journal
      The industry isn't lacking creativity at all. The publishers are. There are literally hundreds of cool minigames sitting around at dev houses gathering dust for 2 reasons:

      1) neither the dev house management nor the publisher will risk their reputation publishing an unpolished game.
      2) the publishers won't risk their money funding the polish on a new game design.
      • Mod Parent Up

        The idea that game developers crank out 10 different versions of Madden's football because they enjoy it is so naive it makes me twitch.

        Everyone wants to do what these kids did, and there's plenty of talent. Turns out that it's easier to have good ideas than it is to have a million dollars to burn on a new concept with an untested devteam.

      • Re:So they failed... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tycho ( 11893 )
        I think an example of why publishers and dev houses are so cautious is they look at what happened to Troika and see what creativity got them. Early last year (2005) Troika went bankrupt. Troika developed three published games: Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil(ToEE), and Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines(VtM:B). All of these games are very creative are and each has elements that are excellent and on the whole I think they are good games. However, they all seem to suffer from many of the same flaws, such

  • Nebulous eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @12:40PM (#14716651)
    Probably the most valuable lesson to be learned from this is that the nebulous approach never really gets a person anywhere. No matter what the industry, it's all about follow-through. How many folks out there started writing/coding/desinging the perfect game? How many folks still have a stack of notes out there in a closet somewhere, under a stack of 5.25 floppies, that would have been a great novel, or the next Freecraft?

    Which brings me to my next question, can schools teach follow-through, or is that something innate?

    (And on a related note, if schools figure out how to teach follow-through, will we see some "entertainment" that's better than mass produced game sequels, reality television, or yet-another-AD&D knockoffs we have now?)

    (Or is the internet living proof that there really is nothing new under the sun?)

    • Re:Nebulous eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Surt ( 22457 )
      Most of what makes 'game industry' games good, when they are good, are the massive amounts of content that go into them. And there's no way to get around having a team of 50 people sitting around for 2 or 3 years making content.

      • Re:Nebulous eh? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gfxguy ( 98788 )
        I don't know if that's true, though... some of the best games seem to be the simplest. It's only the modern push for things to be realistic 3D (wether or not it makes sense) that has created the need for these teams of people.

        Lode Runner was written by one guy. Tetris... some of the most fun and original games. Moreso are the games with small development teams.

        Software engineering has taught us that there are diminishing returns by throwing more developers at a project - to the point of being counter pro

        • Re:Nebulous eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Surt ( 22457 )
          This is somewhat true. The problem is that for most people, games like loderunner and tetris get boring quickly. Once you've played through once, what else is there to do? That's where big project games differ: playing through the once is a long process with a lot of content. The mainstream gameplayer just doesn't enjoy these simple games anymore, they mostly seem to want to play a story. That's why WOW is a huge success at $25 to buy plus $10/month, while tons of freely available downloadable innovati

  • Lessons Learned! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rewinn ( 647614 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @12:43PM (#14716690) Homepage

    From The Article: > It would have been easy to get lost in the development process and let production slip away from us if we hadn't addressed our priorities at the very beginning and throughout the academic year. So for every production decision we made, we asked 'is this going to get us higher marks at the end of the year?' and if the answer to that question was 'no' then we didn't focus on it.

    It sounds like the learned the most important lesson in any large project!

    > We ran into institutional barriers within the University, with the IT department loathe to install certain software and vehemently opposed to giving us access rights to install it ourselves. We often found that they did a bad job and did not test the software they installed, leaving us to wait for a week or two before they would come down and try to fix the problems.

    And ... the second most important lesson too!

    • Yes, the second important lessons. Sys admins tend to get in the way of project completion :).

      As a computer literate electrical engineer I get soooo frustrated with our IT departments lack of understanding of our development process and time frame. Yeah, I know they have their on metrics and have to worry about the marketing folks installing the latest spyware/virus but comeone. Cut us some slack.

      Oh, let the flames begin... :)
  • I'd better watch my ass. The CPAA (Card Player's Association of America) might subpoena me for playing poker last night without authorization.

    (anyone who thinks the above is really farfetched hasn't been reading nearly enough slashdot lately)
    • The die itself doesn't need licensing, the rules of the d20 system (used in D&D 3.x and d20 modern, as well as every single frickin RPG made since) need licensing. High rolls are always good, what an innovative concept.
      • the rules of the d20 system (used in D&D 3.x and d20 modern, as well as every single frickin RPG made since) need licensing

        Do they? Isn't d20 an "open source" game system?

      • Not all RPGs use the d20 system, so there are systems out there that don't share the same kind of license. It just happens that the d20 system is some of the most popular. The d20 system is also open, [wizards.com] which means that there is no royalty paid to anyone, so I'm curious to the sarcasm expressed in your post.
  • Looks like a solid concept. However all the data on the page is from mid -05, any idea if they are going to push the development forward? This looks like a game I would buy, which happens almost never.
  • RTS/RPG hybrid sounds pretty interesting. Student game projects are often pretty inovative, because they come up with some great ideas and not just think profit. Here's another student project, OpenRTS.org [openrts.org], an open source RTS game engine. If you're interested in game developent, then have a look at the project. It has a working prototype of a RTS-game developed in Python. It's still in the early stages, but is very interested in more developers.
  • Fun?
    "Our game was intentionally grim, dark, and morally ambiguous. That was the game we wanted to make and the University was happy to let us work towards that end."
    Ever think that a game should be fun? The games that have stood the test of time tend to be fun.
  • So, to recap:

    What went Right: We got a license, a good team of folks, ambition and potential up the ying-yang...

    What went Wrong: Everything else. Too big an idea, using a complex engine that no one was familiar with in a way that it probably wasn't designed, low skills, not enough resources, not enough time...

    I've attempted enough game-programming to know that a good idea, early ambition and motivation and basic programming skills account for about 3% of the success of a project. The HARD part is turn

  • Yeah right... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    6 Industry Support. When we went to seek advice on how to make our game, we discovered that there were few industry resources available. Game development studios do not share their information, techniques, time or ideas as a general rule, and tend to be overly protective or non-communicative. ...

    As someone involved with UnrealEngine modding, and other stuff. I have my doubts on that whole section.
    I don't know how the deal is with other engines\companies. But Epic provides a lot of information and support to
  • I'm frustrated to hear that people consulted in "the industry" as well as the panel of judges for the competition thought that the game concept was too edgy to be marketed. We NEED edgy. We NEED an injection of fresh ideas like these in the industry.

    The problem is that it's grown beyond "by gamers, for gamers" into a huge industry run by corporate executives and marketing groups, with the people actually putting their souls into the games being the lowest on the ladder.

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