Was the original MOO3 concept better?

[campfreddie]

The argument that Alan is responsible for the problems in the game sounds like the arguments used by governments to suggest that all the problems in the government are due to decisions made by the previous administration.

While occasionally true, this argument is usually used as muck-flinging to distract people from the way that the policies of the current administration have turned a poor situation into a terrible one...

The truth is we will never know if Alan would have made a good game since he was removed from the project at the critical stage where design input was vital. We will also never know if Alan was asked to provide a revolutionary, groundbreaking (and hence complicated and risky) design or whether he kept introducing overcomplicated bits and pieces against the wishes of the management.

Besides, are you sure you've got the right Alan?

The one who worked on MOO3 has a background in board games and to the best of my knowledge, has never worked in graphics.

Perhaps you mean Rantz, who was a graphics designer who took control of the design when Alan left, with the inevitable outcome that the finalised game had both poor art resources and poor design.

[Stormhound]

Originally posted by campfreddie
The truth is we will never know if Alan would have made a good game since he was removed from the project at the critical stage where design input was vital. We will also never know if Alan was asked to provide a revolutionary, groundbreaking (and hence complicated and risky) design or whether he kept introducing overcomplicated bits and pieces against the wishes of the management.

1) At the start, Alan pitched a simpler design, but was told by (then) Hasbro Interactive to "make the ultimate game".

2) Bill Fisher's management style is to stay as involved as possible (not surprising, considering he started QS by doing a lot of the coding and designing himself), and he certainly wasn't afraid to step in and say if something was too much...and when it happened, it stuck unless a VERY good argument was presented for why it should stay. Alan is many things, but stupid isn't one of them.

Originally posted by campfreddie
Besides, are you sure you've got the right Alan?

The one who worked on MOO3 has a background in board games and to the best of my knowledge, has never worked in graphics.

Perhaps you mean Rantz, who was a graphics designer who took control of the design when Alan left, with the inevitable outcome that the finalised game had both poor art resources and poor design.

I know Alan is involved in the graphics for his own board games, but that's a little different beast. What was omitted is the rest of his pedigree: time spent as an editor for a computer gaming magazine, time spent writing strategy guides, and time spent as a producer for some computer gaming titles. He's been far from uninvolved in the creation and evaluation of games.

I'll add at this point that it was the QS cashflow situation, not quality of work, that led primarily to Alan's (and my) release. It was a layoff, not a firing, and we both got very positive recommendations.

Was the timing poor? Rather, IMO. But it wasn't the only bump in the ride (the space combat module, which had to be redone THREE times, and was totally outside Alan's or my bailiwick, stands out as one that wasted a lot of coding time). At this point, though, it's all second-guessing as to whether the game would've turned out better or worse if other things had happened. What happened is what happened, and what we got is what we got, and no amount of Monday-morning quarterbacking will change that.

[TCO]

very interesting. Thanks, pup!

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by campfreddie
The argument that Alan is responsible for the problems in the game sounds like the arguments used by governments to suggest that all the problems in the government are due to decisions made by the previous administration.

While occasionally true, this argument is usually used as muck-flinging to distract people from the way that the policies of the current administration have turned a poor situation into a terrible one...

I wouldn't ever say Alan was responsible for all the problems in the game, and I don't think TCO was implying that either - he's certainly not responsible for any of what happened after he was gone, or for any bad decisions or problems after that, and nobody on any design/production team has 100% control of all aspects of the product, unless you're talking something on a hobby/freeware scale.

I think TCO's point was, and mine is, that from a business standpoint, a great game concept / design doesn't exist abstractly - it has to be great within the limits of the planned resources and timeframe. In other words, something like Stars Supernova Genesis isn't a great design, for the simple reason that the project died.

Normally, despite carping from technical types, senior managers and finance weenies aren't complete idiots, and they make decisions based on risk / reward analyses. Software people are generally hard to manage, with all the different cults, technological evangelists (no, Virginia, Java beans is not the cure to all the world's problems), and egos. Obviously there were changes, but you have professionals with lots of dollars at stake examining the alternatives as they see them and making a judgment call, so until evidence comes out that they screwed up something that was working fine, I'm going to go by the assumption that they were forced to make some hard judgment calls to save (in theory) a project that was drifting badly.

The truth is we will never know if Alan would have made a good game since he was removed from the project at the critical stage where design input was vital. We will also never know if Alan was asked to provide a revolutionary, groundbreaking (and hence complicated and risky) design or whether he kept introducing overcomplicated bits and pieces against the wishes of the management.

We won't know, without objective inside information, but a lot of inferences can be drawn from other designer's expericiences and general project management practice. I've never yet seen or heard of a software project beyond the scope of a device driver that had a frozen design from original concept to production and delivery. In business software, typically what you get is feature creep, when design starts out thin and gets progressively fatter as (in theory) "useful features" are added.

From a project manager standpoint, it's the responsibility of the software architect / lead designer to tell you that you want too much for the time, finance and staff resources you're willing to commit. If there's a breakdown in communication, unless the project management outright lies to the design team or is utterly unrealistic about what resources will be made available (a rather pointless thing to do, in any scenario), then the responsibility falls on the lead designer. It's not a matter of competent design per se, it's a matter of making the design work within the allocated resources, or raise the issue ahead of time that the allocated resources are insufficient for the project scope.

Besides, are you sure you've got the right Alan?

The one who worked on MOO3 has a background in board games and to the best of my knowledge, has never worked in graphics.

Perhaps you mean Rantz, who was a graphics designer who took control of the design when Alan left, with the inevitable outcome that the finalised game had both poor art resources and poor design.

No - interesting, I looked up the Quicksilver Alan Emrich online, and there has been two Alan Emrich's in the industry. The one I knew, who I haven't seen since 1997 or so, was a contract 3D Studio artist for Trilobyte and others, and he headed the San Diego Autodesk 3D Studio User Group for a while. It's not that common of a name, so I assumed that they were one and the same person. My bad.

[TCO]

"At this point, though, it's all second-guessing as to whether the game would've turned out better or worse if other things had happened. What happened is what happened, and what we got is what we got, and no amount of Monday-morning quarterbacking will change that."

I want to come back to this. I see a fault here. Someone with a top managment view should be able to have some take, some lessons, some opinion here. If you really think this way, and Alan thinks this way, I see a part of the problem.

[Dreadnougat]

Did he say there *weren't* lessons learned? NO! You make it out to be implied, which it most certainly is not. He said that it was impossible to tell which would've been better, and I suspect that he's being purposefully generous to keep names from being slandered.

I find it odd that a moderator, michealofmediocreintellect (I'm saying stuff about you that you implied about others, rather blatantly, so bite me or ban me, prove your hypocrisy.), is doing more bashing of other people than the entire opposing side.



Funny, in a you-got-your-ass-handed-back-to-you sort of way.

(ooh I can see it now, you're gonna come back and say "Yah, you DID get your ass handed back to you!" I can hardly wait!)

[TCO]

"At this point, though, it's all second-guessing as to whether the game would've turned out better or worse if other things had happened."

With any plan, it is second-guessing. But it is highly relevant to think how things would have been different. Otherwise, you never change behavior.

[AminMaalouf]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
People will keep trying to bring games to market so we're not all condemned to Freecell evermore, but the failure rate and disappointment rate is going to always be pretty high.

I wonder, how games will look like in a decade. In the moment it looks like developers are intrigue by the possibilities the grafic hardware introduces.

On the otherhand I ask me if the design of complex strategy titles is not a much more conservative business. As we can see whenever successfull titles get a sequel, e.g. several titles from paradox.

It would not be a bad thing if there existed something like a set of standartised tools accessible to every developer. There is no reason to invent the wheel every time a project takes shape.

To my knowlegde (which is indeed nearly zero) fixed standarts and implementable tools are regulary in use when no-game software is developed.

The strategy game market might be too small as that people could specialized in designing and coding tools for others, so I am not too opptimistic we get in the near future the "ultimative, ultracomplex" spacesim we have already dreamt about so long.

[13Matt13]

I wouldn't ever say Alan was responsible for all the problems in the game, and I don't think TCO was implying that either

Funny that doesnt exactly jive with:

Oh...and stormdog and Alan screwd the project up.

Thats a pretty clear placement of blame.

From a project manager standpoint, it's the responsibility of the software architect / lead designer to tell you that you want too much for the time, finance and staff resources you're willing to commit.

And that was tried, only to be met with a "make the greatest game EVER".

No - interesting, I looked up the Quicksilver Alan Emrich online, and there has been two Alan Emrich's in the industry. The one I knew, who I haven't seen since 1997 or so, was a contract 3D Studio artist for Trilobyte and others, and he headed the San Diego Autodesk 3D Studio User Group for a while. It's not that common of a name, so I assumed that they were one and the same person. My bad.

Wow. Now dont you feel bad about saying how Alan "milked" his connections to get his current position as a teacher of game design at a UNIVERSITY?

Can I get a judge's ruling on whether or not this invalidates most of his arguments?

[13Matt13]

It would not be a bad thing if there existed something like a set of standartised tools accessible to every developer. There is no reason to invent the wheel every time a project takes shape.

Thats a double-edged sword. While cutting time and expenses (besides, whos gonna fund the development of such a thing?), it encourages producers/publishers to be lazy. Why be "better" with your own engine (say, the Half-Life 2 one) when you can just get the standard one (say, Unreal engine)? If everyone else is using the "industry standard", the gamer wont have any recourse when games become quite similar.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by 13Matt13

Thats a pretty clear placement of blame.

Not an exclusive one though. But nitpick away.

Wow. Now dont you feel bad about saying how Alan "milked" his connections to get his current position as a teacher of game design at a UNIVERSITY?

At a UNIVERSITY? Wooooooo. No, I don't have any particular emotional attachment over a case of mistaken identity due to a fairly improbable coincidence of name.

Can I get a judge's ruling on whether or not this invalidates most of his arguments?

Sure, file a motion in the Federal District Court of your choice.

I guess that means you want to avoid response, because the only thing invalidated is anything related specifically to Alan's background.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by AminMaalouf
It would not be a bad thing if there existed something like a set of standartised tools accessible to every developer. There is no reason to invent the wheel every time a project takes shape.

To my knowlegde (which is indeed nearly zero) fixed standarts and implementable tools are regulary in use when no-game software is developed.

Standard tools (the MS .NET framework is a beautiful example of one for general business / web app / services / non-graphics driven games) are bread and butter in the commercial software field.

Direct X, DirectSound, GDI+ and lots of other standards are used in Windows game development, and standards first hit the PC gaming industry in the early 90's with VESA graphics drivers and standardization on Dos-extenders, particularly DOS4GW.

Game software development has about as wide a spread in technical issues than the rest of commercial software development put together. Working on cutting edge FPS games involves a whole different set of tools and approaches than RTS or TBS games - which are in turn pretty radically different from each other.

The biggest problem you get into is with setting a minimum level of comp that your product will run on. If you set a minimum standard of 1 gig ram, HT Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher, and an ATI Radeon 9600 or GeForce FX5200 as your minimum machine spec, then you really don't have to worry that much about how much you optimize and tweak your code. You also don't worry much about sales, because not many gamers have comps at that level. The lower the minimum level of comp that you'll design your game for, the more you have to optimize code and design to run decently on those limited specs.

Go back to a game like Sid's Pirates! when you had to get the game to run in 256KB of RAM, from two 360KB floppies, then you really had to tweak things to get a fun feature set to run in that space. Part of Sid's solution was to write a limited purpose OS that used less overhead than DOS, so you had to launch the game by rebooting with the Pirates! A floppy.

The fact that you have great tool sets for Windows is why you have so many great games now (at least in their technical capabilities) that can run on such a wide range of hardware. The problem is those tool sets can only take you a fairly short distance in game coding compared with commercial software coding.

[CharlesBHoff]

Than computer langauge to program in is also than standard tools. Al like the two C compiler I have are out of date , getting the laterly one cost alot of money like 500 to 1000 dollars. In alot of compuer langauge there are rules you need to follow in nameing varables or in declabe something. In Commode C-64 if you didnot declare the lenght of than string
or DIM than default size was use by the program.

[Admiral PJ]

It is a common case that developers announce what will be in a game, then it never ends up in the release.
Over hyping can be a problem, but perhaps us buyers are getting used to not getting Mana from Heaven with our products - we have to be realistic.

Second -Party Developer Engines and libraries can be useful to help designers make better games, and put more gameplay and creativity in the actual design, not the basic mechanics. There needs to be more selection though, microsofts Directx has no real competitors, partly from their monopoly over windows hard coding.

Games design is an art not economics or business, so you get problems when accountants and team managers are too restrictive or change design teams and don't understand the creative needs for projects.

MOO3 and other big games can work as being Epic games if smaller parts of the software are released as expansion or sequels, and if they are coded in readiness for sequels. Maybe a new system like the MMORPG online games would work, where you pay online for updates or expansions.
Maybe MOD's and scenarios should be sold as well , these God like games would well like the Quake business format.

I'm well on the way with a game which uses IPF political point systems, but it works more by controlling unit Command efficiency , being used up for special orders like attack a unit or declare war.
I'm a coder and art/designer and think the big money in games is corrupting it , but i guess it is an industry.

Admiral PJ
London, England

[TCO]

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