Battle Realms Designer Diary #6
Ed Del Castillo returns for another designer diary installment. This time, he talks all about the tools his designers use to create Battle Realms.
Entry #6 - 03/01/01
Liquid Entertainment
Game development looks easy from an outsider's perspective. I've often been asked why major game titles take two years or more to make. "It's just a game!" non-gamers cry. "Come up with a fun idea, slap some art together, and throw it in a box--how hard can it be?"
Any developer who's worked a 24-hour day to squash that last crash bug knows better. Getting a game all the way from the original concept to the store shelf is a difficult, lengthy, and often chaotic process. Schedules that were easily achievable when the project began have to be adjusted as technology develops. Art that was cutting-edge ends up looking dated two years down the road. Designers, artists, and programmers wrestle with difficult technical challenges while constantly chasing a moving target: the changing tastes of a fickle gaming audience.
It's easy to get overwhelmed. Some teams run headfirst into the process without stopping for code design, programming from day one and never stopping until they ship. Other teams drag out the design process for months or even years, afraid to actually start making the game. Still others are constantly playing catch-up, reacting to problems rather than predicting them.
But a good team understands that the first phase of a game's development cycle has very little to do with making the game itself and everything to do with making the best possible tools.
Right Tool for the Right Job
From very basic art exportation utilities to polished editors that ship with the game, development tools come in all sizes and shapes. A tool is a miniproject in itself; often, companies have one or more programmers devoted entirely to writing and updating tools for the length of the project. The purpose of all these tools is to provide the designers, programmers, and artists effective means of bringing a game to life--a flexible method to modify game assets throughout the development cycle. Tools are the team's interface with the gameworld.
For Battle Realms, several game systems required complex tools. The Model Master was one of the first and also one of the most important. Turning the artist's complex 3D models into useable game data was a detail-oriented task that fell on the design department, and the Model Master made that job manageable, though never exactly easy. Several plug-ins were written for our artists' 3D package that allowed them to extract a character's animations, mesh, and textures. The Model Master then recombined all the pieces into a model that could be used in the game.
One of the core principles behind the Battle Realms design was that the world had to be alive. Everything would be in constant motion, with plenty of eye candy to go around. This meant particle effects, and lots of them, which meant we needed a tool to quickly generate new effects--the Particle Master. With more functionality than most commercial software packages, the Particle Master is easy to use, and it has allowed us to build everything from raging fires and billowing smoke to gentle rain and expanding water ripples. The time spent polishing the Particle Master's interface resulted in a solid editor that could be passed off to anyone who had the time and artistic eye to create spectacular effects.
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