Thoughts on Forever

I am going to delay my series of articles on the creation of episode 3 of Dozen Days of Tiles for a couple of weeks so I can touch on a couple of other topics. The big news in computer gaming (and to a lesser extent video gaming) circles is the release of Duke Nukem Forever (DNF). The reviews have been more negative than positive. Some of the negative reviews are negative because of the games play mechanics and other game play issues. These are fine and I consider them valid criticism. Other reviewers are those people that incorrectly think the game should be better because it took so long to develop. These people annoy me because the development time for DNF has nothing to do with its quality. There are a large number of reasons for this, but lets just look at the top three reasons.

First of all, the number of years a project is in development is not related to the development years of a project. A development year is one person working full time on a project for a year. If I spend 4 years working on a game and a team of 4 perfectly coordinated developers worked 1 year on the same type of game, the amount of time spent developing the two games is the same. My game should not be better because it took 4 times as long to develop because it didn't. Therefore, looking at the development time of a game strictly based on the number of years it has been in development is just stupid.

Second, the game changed game engines and major subsystems multiple times during development. This is not something that can be considered lightly as porting code from one platform to another is going to take a good chunk of time. In some cases, you may even need to spend a good chunk of time to recreate functionality if the features of the new engine are different. This is why very few games change their underlying engine mid-stream.

Finally, a huge part of the repeated delays of the game was a result of playing catchup. Many programmers, myself included, have worked on projects that have a moving goalpost. What happens is that you have your initial specifications and you work hard to reach these. Months before reaching the goal there is a review of the project and the big-wig decides that things have changed so new specifications are created requiring major changes to the existing code so the project is delayed and just before the project is finished, the big-wig shows up again and ... repeat until either the big-wig or the project (or both) are dead. DNF was clearly caught in the trap of trying to stay ahead of the game market. Every time it started getting near completion, enough time had passed that the game was no longer meeting the cutting edge requirements of management so the game would be delayed to allow time to catch up with the rest of the industry.

This is similar to what has happened with my Coffee Quest 5 project, the difference being that CQ5 has not been in development for all this time. My problem with CQ5 was more of a wanting a browser based game that would be able to use technology that simply was not available in browsers. The few times I did start on the project, it was quickly put on ice again as the technology simply wasn't there. While there were some Java 3D libraries, they simply did not work well within the browser as I discovered when a huge number of people had issues running CQGL. I had considered porting Coffee Quest to Flash and use PaperVision, but found that it had issues and  Flash Player 10 was going to have some limited 3D support. So I waited for Flash Player 10 only to discover that the 3D effects had major sorting issues. Now  there is the upcoming Mole-Hill version of Flash in beta as well as Web GL so the possibility of finally developing CQ5 is in my mind again.

Had I not had unrealistic expectations for the speed of browser development, I probably would have just enhanced my existing ray-caster or possibly even developed a simple software 3D library and released CQ5 many years ago. Sadly, I had Hardware 3D in the back of my mind and CQ5 ended up on the back-burner as I waited for Adobe or browser venders to finally put proper 3D into browsers. Something that really should have happened a decade ago but still hasn't happened.

While DNF may suck, I wonder how much of it has to do with overly high expectations and how much has to do with poor game play. I won't know the answer to that question until I see a copy of DNF in the bargain bin, as going by the reviewers I trust the game is not worth full price (and probably not worth bargain bin prices either but I am curious).