Dissecting Our Baby: AutoAssault Postmortem - the Good, the Bad, and All the Ugly
The goal of this talk is to communicate the history of the development of AutoAssault through the use of specific examples.
The talk will be broken up into 4 parts:
Pre Contract – This portion of the talk will focus on what was done to secure the deal, what we used, how we pitched and how we eventually signed the deal and some of the specifics. This is normally omitted in post-mortems but the goal of including it here is to show how these facts effected the design and development later. We believe there is a strong correlation between these early stages and the success of a game and it’s usually ignored. (10 Mins)
Prototyping – This portion of the talk will focus on the small team aspect of development from the basic design concepts and how they evolved. At this point the speakers will begin to address some of the major issues with the game including: lack of immediate understanding of what the game is, compromises that were made on the control scheme, changes to look and feel, system requirements, solid toolsets, and underestimating how much work it is to create massive amounts of custom content. (10 Mins)
Content Development – This portion of the talk will focus on the scaling up and production of the full scale world. The speakers will focus on issues with growing a large team quickly, problems with distribution of development ratios (e.g. how many programmers per artist and designer, iterating during content development, balancing feature creep vs. “not enough features” and ramping up to beta and release. (15 Mins)
Release and Post Release – The speakers will discuss the release, early problems and how they were resolved, the relationship with the publisher after release and the effect on the internal company. (10 Mins)
Q&A – 15 minutes.
Intended Audience: People who are working on, or trying to work on a Massively Multiplayer Online game as a 3rd party developer.
Prerequisites: No specific knowledge is required.
Format: Lecture
Date/Time: Friday, 3:00 PM
Room: Congress
