Matts Ramblings

At the start of any project, it quite often feels like anything is possible, the sky’s the limit. The deadline is so far away that its often difficult to gauge just what is both necessary, and needed. This point in the project is dangerous, very dangerous. The temptation is there to go and build the most amazing TTF renderer known to man, or the most amazing wood grain texture generator ever seen, or the most efficient open world streaming engine, or whatever takes your particular technical fancy.

It gets scarier when the designers join in on this, and begin to extrapolate upon pieces of technology which not only dont exist yet, but wont for a very long period of time. “we can have like, a gigantic planet that turns into a forest of trees and waits for you to get close before turning into a giant crab with a weak point that you can hit for massive damage!, we can stream that right?”

At some point, someone needs to sit down and actually decide what the heck it is that we’re going to make, and most importantly why.

Ive been playing a lot of borderlands lately, its a rather fantastic open world RPG game. Except that, its not really open world. Im sure somewhere, on a design document at the start of the project were the words “Open World”. Im sure a lot of debate was had about whether they should go and build a fallout3-a-like open world engine. Except they didn’t they’ve gone with the Unreal engine, and provided a set of levels which whilst being self contained, still provide the illusion to the player that it is a consistent, open world.

The end result is something which is greater than the sum of its parts, it feels like an open world, it plays like an open world, but it blatantly isn’t. As a player, I really don’t care that i cant see one side the entire world map from the other, there is always something to do, I’m of never far from something interesting, and the experience is far more tightly controlled and managed than some other, proper, open world games.

Im certainly not advocating one approach over another (fallout3 was equally brilliant, if completely different in feel), but rather that when given a clean slate to do whatever you so desire, sometimes its best to ask yourself why you want feature X before you start. Can you provide the same experience to the user without the overall cost to the development team. Especially when that cost can be used to add other features, and/or further polish the end result. Gearbox have shown this beautfiully with their open-world-kinda in borderlands.

A rather fantastic game it is too!

Its been a while since ive played  a game which has been put together with so much love that it totally steals my heart. Machinarium (http://machinarium.net/) is that game.

Its devilishly hard, and downright frustrating at times, but it just oozes something special. The world needs more games like this. please!

oh, and welcome to my blog.