Postmortems From Game Developers

Irrational Games’ SYSTEM SHOCK 2 12interface in which there are two distinct modes(inventory management and combat/exploration)between which the player can toggle. Thiswas a risky decision. This bi-modal model wasmandated by our desire to keep the familiar andpowerful mouse-look metaphor common tofirst-person shooters while retaining cursorbasedinventory management. How we switchedbetween modes became our biggest design challenge.Sometimes these mode changes are explicitlyrequested through a mode change key, andsometimes they are invoked automatically byattempting to pick up an object in the world. Sofar this system seems to be working well, thoughonly time and user feedback will tell whether wereally got it right.5. Working with a young teamThe SYSTEM SHOCK team was frighteninglyyoung and inexperienced, especially for such ahigh-profile title. Many of our team memberswere new to the industry or had only a fewmonths’ experience, including the majority ofartists and all the level builders. Of the threeprincipals, only Rob had previous experience inhis role as lead programmer. Neither Ken, thelead designer, nor I, the project manager, hadpreviously worked in these roles. It’s not totallyclear how we pulled off our project with ourlimited experience.Partially, it must have been due to our ability tobond as a team and share knowledge in ourcommunal work environment (“the pit”). To acertain extent, inexperience also bred enthusiasmand commitment that might not have beenpresent with a more jaded set of developers. Wealso worked hard to transfer knowledge fromthe more experienced developers to the less seasonedindividuals. Rob worked on an extremelycomprehensive set of documentation for thefunctional object tools, as well as a set of exercises(“object school”) to be worked on eachweek. These kinds of efforts paid back theirinvestment many times over.This is not to say that our progress was allsweetness and light. The art team, for example,floundered for a long time as we tried to integratethe junior artists and imbue a common artlook in the team’s psyche. We had a lot of verymediocre art midway through our project andthe art team was stagnating. Ultimately, managementhad little to do with the art team’s success—theywere largely able to organizethemselves and create a solid, original look. Onthe management front, our inexperience wasapparent. We blundered through the early stagesof development with scheduling and managementissues. A large problem was our failure toassign specific areas of responsibility andauthority early on. Bad feelings arose as a result,which could have been avoided if we had clearlydelineated areas of responsibility from the start.What Went Wrong1. Poor level design processLevel design is a clearly defined professionalactivity in the game industry. It’s a professionthat mixes artistic and technical skills in equalmeasure, and the bar is raised on both fronts