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).

Is Forever Delayed or Never?

Dozen Days of Words episode 5 is in a functional state though is not finished. I could probably finish the game for release next week if necessary but with my nephew in town I decided that an extra week before the official release date was a good idea. If I do finish it early I may post the game a week early and link to it from here so readers get a week of early access to the game. I'll let you know my decision next week.

The big news today (well, last night if you want to get technical about it) is the fact that 3D Realms is closing it's doors. They are the company that is developing Duke Nukem Forever, which will now probably never see the light of day. While Take 2 still holds the publishing rights, they are not funding the game. It is still possible that another company will purchase the rights to the game from 3D Realms but with existing distribution rights, this is less likely. Most likely the game is dead. When you think about it, the fact that the game was so long in development made it unlikely that it would live up to the hype. Even though a lot of the delay was probably caused by the game developers continually playing catch-up with the rest of the industry, too many people figure that such a long development time must mean that the game should be really good. These unrealistic expectations means that no matter how good the game was it would never be good enough.

I suppose it is also possible that the opposite would happen and that the majority of people expect the game to be bad. While the game being better than expected could be good, if nobody bothers to try the game because they expect it to be junk then you still end up losing. Either way, DNF was in a pretty bad spot.

Making a Dream Fall

I was actually about to post the rest of Dozen Days of Dice episode 7 today but thankfully looked at my release schedule and realized that I was actually suppose to release chapter 23 of the Making of One of those Weeks eBook. This chapter covers the solution to the two part puzzle that makes up episode 23. Of course, for those following from a couple weeks ago, another page of DDD episode 7 was posted, so you can play the beta version of that game if you aren't interested in OotW.

E3 is this week and there has been a lot of coverage of it. I think that the Penny Arcade comic of the E3 2008 keynotes covers it pretty well. Final Fantasy XIII coming to XBox 360 is a major blow to Sony and certainly makes the 360 the superior HD system gamewise now that the biggest PS3 exclusive is no longer exclusive. Still, the PS3 is the best Blu-ray player on the market, too bad BD disks cost twice as much as DVDs and upconverting DVD players do a really good job. I am quite happy with my Wii. For those who are wondering, I am still using Wii Fit, though have not lost as much weight as I would have liked.

The game that I am looking forward to the most is Animal Crossing for the Wii. The non-Wii game that has gotten my attention and may make me either get a new gaming system or upgrade my PC is Fallout 3. The game that I am sill wondering about is Halo Wars, as it will be interesting to see if someone can actually pull off a successful RTS on a console. And of course, Duke Nukem Trillogy must be mentioned, though I have no idea what to say about it.

Forever coming soon?

There was an interesting trailer, or should I say teaser trailer, that was released today. It appears that Duke Nukem Forever, a game that started development in 1997, is still in development and they have released a sneak preview of the trailer that they will be releasing soon. Their site is http://www.3drealms.com/, and if you are a fan of Duke Nukem you will be pleased by this news. How can a game take so long to create? I am sure Coffee Quest fans want to know this as well, though in my defense I can point out that I am a single person working on multiple projects without a budget in my spare time. In Duke's case, I believe it is the marketing equivalent of an infinite loop. The quality level required for a AAA commercial game is very high. When a project takes longer to develop when the game is near ready, the quality level may no longer be AAA levels so the decision is made to take a bit longer and up the quality of the graphics, sound, game play, or whatever it is that is lacking compared to other titles. Since you have more time, the coders might as well add new features to the game as well. This feature creep causes the revised game to be late and when it is finished it is no longer AAA worthy so the cycle starts again.