Medal of Honor Pacific Assault Designer Diary 3

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Aug 13, 2004 2:34 pm PT

Ever wonder what it's like being a game developer? Lead designer Dave Nash walks us through one of his days. Here's a hint: it involves a lot of meetings.

Developing games is not all fun and games. In fact, it can be a hugely time-consuming job. To illustrate, Dave Nash, the lead designer of the upcoming Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, was kind enough to walk us through one of his typical days as this anticipated first-person shooter winds its way to completion. In Pacific Assault, you'll play as a Marine Corps rifleman caught up in the intense battles of the Pacific theater of operations.

Behind the Green Curtain

By Dave Nash
Lead designer, Electronic Arts

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, making video games does actually take some hard work. The responses I get from people when they find out what I do for a living never ceases to amaze me. Things like "Oh, wow, that must be fun--sitting around and playing games all day" and "Must be rough. Have you ever had a real job?" are incredibly common. Don't get me wrong, being a game developer is a great job to have, but not for the reasons that people outside of the industry think. We make games because we love them--both playing them and creating them. We spend absurd amounts of time away from our families over the course of a given project because we are driven to make an entertaining product that gamers around the world will enjoy.

In order to prove my point that we developers don't sit around on our keister all day eating pizza and playing Space Invaders, I thought I'd give a brief glimpse into a typical day of work for me, as lead designer of Medal of Honor Pacific Assault.

8:25am Dropped my daughter off at preschool, then headed down the hill to the office. Coffee, glorious coffee, awaits me!

9:09am Finished working on final spec for our corpsman (medic) AI behavior with senior producer Brady Bell. By now, half a dozen other issues have come and gone across my desk:

  • Enemy radioman because he is buggy. Need to get one of our designers on it right away!
  • More focus-group testing tonight. Before we have consumers play, let's determine if the level is too difficult. Maybe we need to add more ammo.
  • Ugh, got some bullet hit decals floating in midair. I'll need to get the artists to check the collision boxes of those rocks.
  • Need to wrap up my developer diary for GameSpot today. Time to get cracking.

9:33am Loaded up DevTrack, the system we use to track game development. This is the software we use here at the office to track the bugs in our game. As the project gets nearer to shipping, every member on the team is required to check the bug database on a daily basis to make sure nothing is sitting in their queue that will block others from doing their work. I was good to go on that front, but I ended up writing a couple of new bugs for some of the other team members. (AI characters are missing some dialogue, and the radio guy still has an invisible radio.)

9:41am Found out that our single-player demo level (for which I am responsible) had a minor bug where the icons on the player's compass that indicate where friendly squadmates are were not drawing correctly. Fixed a couple of lines of code in the level's script and launched the level to verify that the problem was fixed.

Making sure Pacific Assault's gun battles are exciting and balanced is tougher than you might think.

9:53am Fired up our source control program, alienbrain. I'll try to explain what this is in as basic terms as possible. Game developers keep all of the code, assets, and levels that combine to make up a video game stored on a company network. Source control programs provide access to all of these thousands and thousands of files. Whenever someone wants to alter one of these files (in my case, one of the level scripts for the demo), they have to load up the source control software, "check out" the file (in most cases only one person at a time can change a file, to avoid duplicated or lost work), change the file as necessary, and then "check it in." Think of it like a huge library full of the files that make up a game (as opposed to books). Now that I've updated the demo with my bug fix, everyone else on the team can get my change and see that the bug is gone. Problem solved!

10:28am Had a quick chat with a programmer about whether or not some new HUD (heads-up display) icons are bright enough, before heading to our 10:30 team leads meeting. This is a daily meeting the team leaders have in order to go over any current pressing issues.

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