RTX Red Rock Designer Diary

Entry #1 - 02/27/03

By Hal Barwood
RTX Red Rock Designer and Project Leader

Today is one of those tough days when I have to make a feature cut in Red Rock. It's not a big one, and it won't hurt the gameplay, so I should be happy. After all, this sort of thing is normal and expected: A designer works up a design, it gets refined during preproduction as a collaboration develops among the team members, and then after months of hard work milestones get missed, and the ax must fall. Something in the design, for whatever reason, is simply out of reach. Sometimes the blade comes down hard and--chop!--a game is ruined. Sometimes a game gets leaner and meaner and better. In this case, whew, we're still OK.

The feature in question is a form of alien animal, something I generically refer to as vermin, whose purpose is to bite the ankles of our intrepid hero, EZ Wheeler, and cause distress without actually threatening his life. One of the vermin types jumps on him and bites, and another rushes forward and explodes. A third type was supposed to sit on ceilings with a little camera, gathering intelligence for its alien masters and dropping teleporters to spawn a ton of serious bad dudes for Wheeler to deal with. This thing has been half developed for months now. The model is beautiful. The little camera is cool, and the lens rotates nicely to focus. The thing hops around with creepy low-grade menace. But it has never successfully dropped a teleporter into our gameworld, much less spawned a single enemy warrior in all that time. What's the problem? Level designers are placing them and assigning important parameters to their behavior in doing so. One of our programmers is spiffing up the underlying logic. But nothing shows. That tells me something--underneath the surface, there's a lack of interest in this thing. And if we don't value it, no player will either. We're better off with it gone, and so be it!

So, with a good cut to make, why is the process so tough? Because we're in schedule hell, with hard dates to make and not much time to make them. Each little featurette must be measured against time that could be spent honing up the frame rate, for example, on the PS2. And cuts can backfire. A month ago we cut robot death. Respawning secondary avatars into the game is a difficult matter, but we've been paying a price, because now we have to deal with the demands of nonlethal encounters between our robots and alien enemies. And so it goes--finishing one feature, lopping off another, dodging toward the finish line.

I may get the itch for further cuts that will threaten the integrity of our game in a way that this one didn't. And, um, hey--time to get back to work and make sure that doesn't happen. Time to take another look at that pipe labyrinth in chapter four to see if we really need that thing.