A Development Analogy

In an effort to get people to understand the process of creation in general, I've constructed the following analogy:

Making a user map in Starcraft (or whatever game that allows for user created content)

Personally, I've made custom levels for all sorts of games in my spare time for fun. Games such as Warcraft 2, 3, Starcraft, Half-life, C&C Red Alert, and some others that I've probabably forgotten. Although it is easy to get the intital concept down of what you want, making it look good is another matter altogether.

So following with the Starcraft Analogy, making a map is easy right? All you need is to put down some crystals and gas, a couple of starting points and TA-DA! You have a functioning Starcraft map. Doesn't mean it's any good though. There's a lot of details to get down pat with just the starting posistions, making sure that both starting points have equal amounts of resources so it's fair. Perhaps you may decide to put in a zillion resources just so there's no expanding needed, just waves after of waves smashing into each other like the Big Game Hunters map. The concequences of that is that resource management is mostly a moot point, and there's no element of trying to expand to ensure you can win the long term fight.

All of that was just for the *starting points*, doesn't even touch on the elements of placing physical barriers, expansion sites, creating choke points; not to mention making all this stuff balanced so that every player travels equal distance and have equal advantages and disadvantages. Even if you add all that stuff in that doesn't even touch on adding in doodads to make the whole thing look pleasing to the eye.

That's just for a scriptless multiplayer map. Placing in events takes even more time and polish to pull off properly, and you'll have to troubleshoot any problems that pop up. A lot of effort and hours can be placed into just a single map, a custom map.

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So where does the analogy fit in? Simply put, all the effort put into making something as "simple" as a custom map and making it look good can be applied to most elements when it comes to developing a game. There are steps that put a fuctional barren map, into the catagory of amedicoremap with some intresting elements, and then to finnally a polished well thought out map. Such things change basic physics to more advanced physics; simplistic AI to complex AI; basic constructed environments into dynamic ones; simple textures to artistic textures.

Everything has the potential to have a lot of detail smushed into, however, how many people go to that excessive level of detail? It's easier to do if it's your envisionment of what is pretty or acceptable, but imagine yourself creating towards someone else's vision of what is acceptable. That has to be done unfortunatly so that everything overall fits and flows together.

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So if you've ever made any custom made content for a game that you've played, and went to the effort of trying to make it pretty, put tiny little details into it to make it perfect, consider how much time is required to put that level of detail into games these days, with content that's 20+ hours. Many games are perfectly functional without being pretty, but making things pretty takes a lot of time and resources. Not every developer has equal resources either.

Just imagine yourself as a custom mapmaker, and you had to detail 100 maps. Some developers might have 10 people for that task, others might just have 1, but the exact same deadline. What happens?