the 15 hour movie

that's my big new concept in fps game-development.

for a very long time i have been a big, big fan of putting 100% of a teams resources into a single playable and fully-representative map before any other content is created. if people have to twiddle their thumbs all day for awhile, then contract them out.

so the 15 hour movie is..

you get your game designers (not mappers) to sit down with your art crew and pretend that you are making a movie of a single play through of the game. i mean the entire game. from opening scene to menus to level transitions to game to everything. the movie is meant to look as much like you tivo'd someone playing the final product (except they'd be a badass and almost never die).

ok. so what does this get you? many things, but most important..

it gives the team a precise target for what they are creating.

i can envision it working like this..

you send your design and content team off to make their movie. your programming team starts building the tech to just be able to play back the movie in realtime. sound familiar..

killzone
http://games.kikizo.com/news/200602/065_p1.asp

actually. if you have not watched the killzone video in awhile, watch it again.. what happened? doesn't look as impressive as it did before.

so by making the movie you get to raise the studios internal bar!

at some point you'll need some of the content team to start filling out the content because for a movie it can just be on rails. once you have a full map the programming team can start start bitch at the content people to cut back here and there. hopefully the game-designer reigned the artists in enough so that the cut back is not too severe.

soon your movie will be done and the content team can start working on filling in everything not in the movie as well as working with the realtime movie viewer to make sure everything is within performance.

during this time the programming team is making the first map of the game fully playable.

now here is the cool bit.. once that first map is playable.. almost the entire game will magically be playable.

hmm. now if i only had 5 million dollars! (actually, if i had 5 million dollars i would retire and just make smallish free games)