Industry Insider - July 2008

A Day in the Life…

by Eric Marlow

This column is all about being an Insider. The whats, wheres, whys, and hows of being a game developer. So I thought it might be interesting to give you a sense of what it might like working in a game development company. What’s it like on the INSIDE today?

First of all, please allow me this one caveat – I can only tell you so much. The nature of game development is such that we must at times not disclose certain aspects of what we are doing. This may mean we cannot talk about what products we are working on, nor can we discuss certain technical underpinnings of how we make the games. This is simply for self-protection. If we opened our big mouths too wide, our competitors may get wind of what we are doing and come up with their own products to compete with us. But eventually the veils of secrecy lift themselves, and we can talk more freely about what we are doing. Unfortunately for the next few weeks until our publisher announces the title we are working on, we can’t say much about our current project.

As I write this article there is a lot of activity going on in our office. We are nearing completion of our first home consumer game. All I can say is that it is a next gen platform game, and it will be the first time such a product has been developed in the Philippines. It’s a very exciting time for local game development!

It’s possible that most of you who read this article have a basic understanding of what it takes to make a game. A game is nothing but programming and art, wrapped with creativity and inspiration. But as they say the “devil is in the details”, and right now as we near completion of our product we must make sure that everything is working as it was intended. Testing the game is taking priority right now. All aspects of the game must be examined – not only to see if the game works correctly, but to make sure that any recent changes have not adversely affected the game. We must test the bounds of the game, including playing the game literary for hours at a time. Sometimes when software runs over a long period of time, “leaks” may occur as the software accesses the system’s memory, and these leaks tend to clog up the works. Obviously we can’t let this happen.

One aspect of game development you may not realize is modifying the software so it can be run in different countries. This processes we call “localization” – meaning we change the software to meet the local cultural, language, and regulation body requirements. Mostly this involves the translation of the on-screen user interfaces and dialog into the country’s native language, but there is more to it than that. Right now we are changing the included English into French and Spanish. Other language will follow. If you have ever noticed how much written language is in a typical game, you will know this is not a trivial task. There will be NTSC as well as PAL versions of the game too.

One practical aspect of running a game company is that you have to plan around the project transitions. This means that as one project comes to a close, there may be another one that must be started. Because the entire staff may not start the next project at the same time (some pre-production and design work must begin before programming and 3D models can be developed) this is a good time to allow some of your staff to hone their skills. Right now we have a number of team members spending their day doing research and test projects. Game development as an industry is constantly changing, and without knowledge of the newest techniques we may fall behind. This is also a good opportunity for us to create some “demos” – example art and programming we can show others during the marketing phase of our studio.

Oh, and as I finish this article it’s lunchtime, and many of the employees are playing DOTA. Well, we are a game company after all…