Interviews

JA – Biggest headache in creating your game?

Steve Ince – Fitting the development work around the other things I need to do to make some money.
 

Jonathan Boakes – Migraines? Or brain tumors? Or, losing lots of work (whole projects) in freaky urban electrical storms. That resulted in some headaches, and hard work. Long hours made our eyes bleed. Literally.   

Britney Brimhall – Having to create more assets than you can possibly imagine, and then finding out that many of those assets are not going to work in the game and will have to be recreated from scratch. 

Tamás Marosi Z. (Pierrot) – Time, money, and then time and money again. And some more time, and of course money.
 

Mikael & Eleen Nyqvist – Having to go back to the drawing board when a complicated puzzle doesn’t work.
 

Matt Clark – There was that one in summer… but I took a painkiller, and it went away.
  

Cos Russo – Bug testing is a tedious but necessary part of the development process, it was especially time consuming and tedious because I did most of it.

It’s difficult accomplishing a giant project like Alida on your own – usually an established development company will have project management people running the whole thing to ensure the project is completed by the delivery date.  The hardest thing was keeping on track, keeping to my own deadlines.  It was also hard at times keeping positive about the whole project.

Agustin
Cordes & Alejandro Graziani – I
just had a nasty one last Thursday. It bothered me the whole
day and wouldn’t go even after swallowing two aspirins, one pill
of paracetamol and some funny herbs that the neighborhood’s witch
gave me.

Wait – did you mean a
physical headache or biggest issue, figuratively speaking? If it’s
the latter, then it’s by far the trees. Yes – trees. Vegetation.
Plants. We have lots of it in Scratches and
those 3D models have lotsa polygons which means lotsa CPU hog.
Like I said, the garden was incredibly more difficult to do than
we expected. Even with 1GB of RAM the location couldn’t be fully
loaded into memory. Just picture this: each node needs 6 textures.
The whole central garden has ‘just’ 12 nodes, which
means 72 textures. Are you following me? Alright, at least 60%
of those textures required up to four passes
each (count them – four), meaning rendering them four times
with different sets of trees, and then cutting
and pasting the needed parts in order to create the final texture.

And worst of all, I’m not even pleased with the garden. Needless to say, our next game is taking place on a desert.

Chris
Brendel – In
the final few months of developing Shady Brook,
after I had already finished creating over half of the game’s
video sequences, the actor who played the game’s main
character quit without explanation, only half of his lines recorded.  As
I had already spent months of work making the video sequences
and synching the animations to the actor’s voice, I was
forced to recast the main character’s voice at the last
minute.  The voice never felt quite right, and on top of
that, the actor had to synch up the lines to the animation onscreen,
which made the pacing of the voice sound ‘off’.  I
feel this hurt the game. In fact, this bothered my so much
that, for a while, I considered canceling Shady
Brook entirely!

Bryan
Wiegele – The
biggest headache for us has been getting sufficient bug testing
done before release. I feel it went smoother with Delaware
2 but it was a huge setback on Delaware
1 to find out the game wasn’t running on Windows
98 and ME until after it had been manufactured.

Gey & Silvio Savarese – Well, definitely tuning and testing the game. This is a very boring (but important!) step. We have to play the game all over again hundred of times to tune up every single aspect of it…

Michael
Clark – The
biggest headache for me in creating games is animation.  I’m
not very good at it, and it’s probably the most tedious
part of making a game.  I don’t quite have the patience
for it.  I would much prefer to have the resources to do
full-motion-video and have live actors.  Although I suppose
that has its drawbacks as well.

Knut
Mueller – To find a serious bug or error after finishing
the game. For example, in the first verion of RHEM1 there
was a fatal error. It was a stressful time. I think I got my
first grey hairs during that period. After finishing the game
there are also foregone conclusions with publishers, retailers,
money …..lots of headaches.

Keith Nemitz – All of the writing! Story and dialog destroyed my naive development schedule.