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Dark Reign 2
08/19/99
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There's a time on every project when you "get over the hump." I think we just hit it on Dark Reign 2. It crept up on me a few weeks ago when I was getting ready for a press tour to Europe. We were working late nights in the office, getting the build ready for my trip, and everything was starting to come in. Hour by hour I could see all the features we had been talking about for well over a year now coming to fruition as they were given their final implementation. We were playing multiplayer games to test a lot of the new stuff, and lo and behold, it felt like a game. I would forget that I was supposed to be testing something specific and would focus all my energies on winning. Then I knew it... we were over the hump.
That's the weird thing about game development. You spend a lot of time imagining what the game is going to be like while you create the technology. You play through scenarios in your head, you make balance spreadsheets, you try anything you can to imagine what the game is going to be like, but nothing can beat actually playing the game. And there I was, for the first time, playing the game we had imagined for so long. And let me tell you, it's a lot of fun (of course I wouldn't tell you anything else). It's not perfectly balanced though, there are things that I think will still change with the units, and pathing and collision are not perfect, but nevertheless I would constantly lose myself in using all the new units and features that are going to make Dark Reign 2 so special.
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Once you reach this stage of the project, everything begins to fall into place. We completed a first pass on all the missions in the game about a month back, but there was always a caveat when playing them. Something or other wasn't working properly so you could never really get a true sense for the mission. But now the missions take on a whole new life. The designers are now going back and taking another pass at the missions to really make them shine. The art team is focused on the different worlds we have for the missions. The programming team is doing some cleanup: improving our movement code, improving the AI, optimizing the engine's performance, and generally making the game more polished. I'm just playing the game - testing a mission and giving my feedback, playing multiplayer and working on the balance. It's a tough job but someone's got to do it.
Thanks for all the e-mail you sent me after last month's Designer Diary. I always love to go through the messages and see what everyone is thinking. I wish I could answer all of them, but that would be impossible. So I will try to answer several every month in my diary installments. If you have a question or comment, e-mail me at darkreign2@pandemicstudios.com.
Next: Greg answers questions
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