Postmortems From Game Developers

Bohemia Interactive Studios’ OPERATION FLASHPOINT 222. The communityOPERATION FLASHPOINT’s public following isincredible. We ourselves are surprised by thenumber of people creating fan sites, developingnew content for the game, or just keeping intouch with the community by reading news andforums. Currently there are hundreds of differentsites dedicated to FLASHPOINT, and dozensof them are of a truly professional quality withnews updated almost hourly. Another greatthing about the community is that some of thepeople have been following this game for yearsalready, and they still carry a great deal ofenthusiasm for it.Some of the first great fan sites started out morethan two years before the game was released,and we managed to keep people’s excitementgoing with regular updates about the improvementswe were making to the game throughoutits development. We take it as a good sign thatmost of the sites are still online and updated regularly.About halfway through development, weinvited some people from the community to participatein the design of the game directly, viaexternal forums and newsgroups. Their skills inboth military and gaming areas were invaluable,and we constantly used their feedback toimprove the game.Since the release of the public demo version(around three months prior to the release of thefinal game), the community following hasbecome much bigger. The only downside to theincrease in the community base is that the communityhas become much less focused and lessmature, as the average age of those visiting theWeb sites has descended.The Head of a tank crew in Oxygen. Youcan see face of Petr Pechar, one of theartists on OPERATION FLASHPOINT, under thehelmet.A Soviet AKSU rifle shown in BohemiaInteractive’s proprietary modeling tool,Oxygen, with direct real-time previewingusing the game’s engine.But the community still looks really vital andthe most-visited fan site has counted millions ofpage views already. Recently, fans have been creatingcustom-made tools and enhancements tothe game in addition to the various Web sitesand services.