Practical Realities of Game Development

1
Practical Realitiesof Game Development

• Kevin Burfitt
• Technical Producer
• Atari Melbourne House

2
Culture Shock

• Game Development is a business.
• We are here to make games and sell enough copies
  to make a profit.
• Development is not a democracy
• Design is not by committee
• 50 people will never agree on a game design
• You may not even like the game you work on
• Pressures can be enormous
• Good teamwork is critical (Art/Prog/Design)

3
The Design is fluid

• Start the project with somewhere between a rough
  pitch for a game and a full design.
• The design can be changed by
• Technical limits or discoveries
• Management
• Marketing
• Political reasons (company politics, world
  politics)
• Licensing restrictions
• Gameplay feedback

4
Expect the unexpected

• Good development methods allow the project to
  change course.
• Teach students to be ready for (and expect)
  changes in requirements.
• Good Programmers/Artists will anticipate change
  and be prepared for it, without ignoring the
  current goals.

5
Agile Development

• There are well documented methods of software
  development that match our needs.
• See www.agilealliance.org
• AGDC 2003 Iterative Game Design
• Keynote Speaker Iain Fischer, Ensemble Studios

6
Time is not on your side

• Large projects run 18 months
• Some can be under 12m, some over 6 years
• Teams of 50 are not uncommon
• 75 man-years of development on a single title
• 10,321 tasks tracked on Transformers (13 months)

7
Milestones

• Milestones at 1-3 month intervals
• Publisher milestones
• Press milestones
• Trade show milestones (E3, TGS, GDC)
• Shipping milestones (Xmas)

8
Nanoseconds matter
9
Example PS2 CPU

• Games a 2 year project that worries about a
  billionth of a second!
• PS2 150mhz CPU (main CPU)
• 60fps game gets 2.5 million cycles per frame
• 20 car racing game, AI gets 0.5-1ms per frame
  total
• Thats 0.025ms per car, 3750 instructions each

10
Lack of CPU time

• There is never enough CPU to be shared around.
• AI, Rendering, Physics, Sound, all fight for CPU
• Rendering takes 50-75 of that time
• Optimization techniques are important
• Knowledge of limitations of systems is critical
• E.g. Memory allocation is horribly slow
• STL implementations differ, know where to use it
• Knowledge of how to gather statistics

11
Faster machines ! more time

• The future holds little hope
• There will still only be 16.6 milliseconds in
  1/60th of a second
• HDTV has 4x more pixels than standard TV
• 5.1 audio, larger multiplayer
• More content expected by consumers
• Smarter AI is probably not a linear problem
• Physics is generally not linear
• Higher framerates (PC)

12
Smarter methods

• Quaternions
• Goldsmith/Salmon hierarchy building
• Faster Sorting techniques
• If I had 1 for every bubble sort Ive seen a
  programmer write!
• Never trust a compiler!
• A good programmer can optimize better than the
  best compiler
• Modeling techniques
• can make a model 50 less expensive with smart
  work, with the same number of polygons.

13
Lack of Memory

• PS2 has 32mb of RAM (give or take)
• Codebase can be up to 8-10mb (including buffers)
• Models, Animation data,
• Textures
• AI data
• Visibility/Occlusion data
• And the stuff we forget
• Text strings (which can double in size for
  Unicode)
• Metagame data

14
Quality, Stability

• Test everything you do
• Applies to Programmers and Artists
• Learn to test properly
• Learn what questions to ask

15
Tools maketh the game

• Its all about a fast turnaround to get more
  feedback
• Perl, Python, etc to wrap tools
• Preprocess vs Ingame
• Doing nothing is always faster than doing
  something
• Automated builds, Automated testing
• External tools
• Lint
• Source control (Art code)
• Profiling tools (Vtune, aProbe, CATS, etc)

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References

• My Personal Info
• kevin.burfitt_at_atari.com www.torps.com (personal
  site blog)
• The site I assume all students visit
• www.gamasutra.com (Game development, postmortems,
  etc)
• Reference Websites
• www.gdaa.com.au
• www.igda.org (including Quality of Life
  whitepaper)
• www.sumea.com.au (Aussie game developers)
• www.agilealliance.com