March 3, 2008
Careless Assumptions
Last Friday our level team (that’s me and one other guy, on the design side) met with delegates from other departments and the creative director for a run-through of the level. It’s a pretty standard kind of weekly meeting - we’ll discuss what’s been done on the level so far, what’s broken, and what needs to be added/changed to make the level better. These are some of my favorite meetings, for sure.
In these meetings, though, as we discuss the minutiae of each “event” (a small chunk of the level), it’s frequently the case that there will be talk of features that are in the pipeline from other departments - “oh man, right here, where this [thing] falls down, let’s use that new [physically based object] simulation tech to [cause cool effect].” (I’m trying to edit things that could get me electro-shocked by our publisher.) And we, the designers, think to ourselves, “wow, I didn’t even know that we had [physically based object, which I'll subsequently shorten to PBO] simulation tech!” The conversation inevitably skews toward the possibilities afforded by the new PBO simulation tech, since nobody in the room had really thought about using it before, and before you know it, the event has been reworked to include/feature/expand upon the “new feature.”
The problem, you might think, is that we don’t really know anything about PBO simulation tech. And you’d be right! After all, we just learned about it a second ago. But we’re assuming that our source knows what’s up with it - presumably, he had a conversation with the engineer who’s implementing this feature, and therefore figured out all the hairy details about what it can do.
Filed by sean at 10:11 pm under games
5 Comments