Sidhe Interactive
Evolving
Track design in Sidhe Interactive's GripShift game (Click to enlarge)
The design people will be looking at how they can actually execute and make it different, fun, exciting, and interesting. They will also consider what sort of technology they can bring to the table so that their technology is a bit different to, for example the coders’ technology. They would be bearing in mind the things which are becoming increasingly important in games, such as lighting effects, particle effects and textures.
This group considers how the game can be made to look as good as possible or whether it actually needs to look good at all. If it does then what type of appeal is it going to have? At this point they’ll have a skeleton team working on it. This might be a couple of artists working on concept art, basically trying to knock together images that convey a scene or moment from the game. These pieces of art need to give an understanding of what the team is trying to build.
The graphic requirements in Gripshift were more technical as it is so specific and differed from Frankie Dettori Racing, based on the Melbourne Cup where there are more artistic decisions such as drawing the various horses.
With Gripshift, the concept art had a track going over the hill and a buggy flying around so that people could start to feel what they were trying to do for the game. This starts to help define the visual look of the game and the team can start iterating on that, based on what looks good and what could work. The Gripshift team then started designing things like props for the games, pieces of scenery, a road sign or petrol station.
At this stage one or two of the coders come on and start playing around, testing some things out. At the same time the designer and producer are working away to flesh out a comprehensive design document – detailing everything down to the smallest little bit of detail in the game; this becomes the production ‘bible’.
Having a key design and clear focus is necessary to make sure the iterations don’t wander off too far. However the actual process of game development is fairly linear and proscribed.
One of the key things Andy wanted for Gripshift was a track editor so that players could build their own challenge levels and race levels for single and multi play. This requirement influenced a lot of the development process.
Frequently gamers ask for more realism but later realise that they don’t want it as it can be a bit dull. A fast game full of action is more spectacular but less realistic.
The process rolls out from there. One of the things that the industry is moving into in a big way is prototyping. In the past games would get made and sometimes it was only discovered once they essentially had all the pretty graphics and animations that the game wasn’t actually all that much fun. They could have found that out if they’d just built it with stick figures and done exactly the same thing. So prototyping is about trying to get a feel for what the game’s all about – what it’s actually going to feel like when someone’s playing. This is where the real pre-production work comes in; the prototype is tweaked a lot and eventually expanded upon.
A scene would be constructed with base models where a castle scene would have just blocks for the castle, no textures, nothing on it; a few objects popped in just to get a feel for the game.
At this early stage of prototyping the team would just be playing it themselves, depending on the type of game. With something like Gripshift they can get a good feel for how it’s going to play and who it’s going to appeal to. Where a game is aimed at a different market, such as teenage girls, it would be necessary to bring some of those people in and get their rough feel for it.
Nowadays the size of a game is defined not so much by the action coding itself but by the coding for other contents such as graphics and music.
Next generation games for the Xbox 360 and Play Station 3, and even some of the Play Station 2 games coming out now, have got teams with upwards of 100 people working on them, with many spending US $10 – 20 million on each game. The biggest team Sidhe has working on a game at the moment is 30 plus people.
The hardware needed for a game is quite significant as it can define everything from the start. Gripshift didn’t require the massive hardware that restricts the production of graphics. The game was specifically aimed at Playstation Portable and is fairly low specification although high for a handheld game. The graphic detail was defined right from the start.
There is a different challenge working on a game which will be released on multiple machines e.g. King Kong. At least seven versions from low to high specification will be made to make the most of what a particular hardware can do.
Maya 3D software was used for Gripshift while Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for 2D productions.
