Postmortems From Game Developers

Surreal Software’s DRAKAN: ORDER OF THE FLAME 30As the technology lead, I was determined tobuild Surreal’s foundations on its technology. Byretaining rights to our engine and tools, wealways had something to fall back on if a gamedesign was cancelled by the publisher. This alsoallowed us to develop multiple game titles fromone generic technology and license the technologyto other companies. Any investment in timethat the programmers and I put into the engineGame DataRelease date: August 1999Developer: Surreal Software Inc., Seattle, Wash.http://www.surreal.comGenre: 3 rd -person fantasy action-adventureIntended platform: Windows 95/98Project budget: $2.5 millionProject length: 28 monthsTeam size: 23 full-time developers, 2 sound andmusic contractorsCritical development hardware: Pentium II and AMDK6-2 (3DNow!), 200 to 450MHz, 128MB RAM withNvidia Riva 128 and TNT, 3dfx Voodoo 2 3Dhardware. Artist workstations: Wacom tablets.Critical development software: Windows software,Programming software: Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 and6.0, Visual SourceSafe 5.0, Intel VTune 2.5,InstallShield International 5.0. Art and animationsoftware: Softimage, 3D Studio Max, AdobePhotoshop, In-house modeling and texturing tools.Sound and music: Sonic Foundry Soundforge, EmagicLogic Audiocould be quickly put to use on another project ifanything went awry.We moved away from the popular DOOM-typeengines toward a landscape-style renderingengine in order to set our games apart. Therewere many unique ideas that we could buildfrom this: flying, underwater environments, outdoordeathmatch, and so on. But the technologywas not only about rendering; the tools had toempower the designers and be general enoughto support almost any game. So I designed atoolset in which every game-specific propertyand behavior would be provided by the gamecode itself, and the editor would be just ageneric interface to the underlying game specifics.Origins of the BeastAfter pitching several game ideas to all themajor publishers, we finally sold the first“dragon” concept to Virgin Interactive Entertainment(VIE) in the summer of 1996. The conceptwas very different from today’s DRAKAN.The first concept was for a dragon RTS game inwhich the player’s dragon could fly around takingover villages and forcing them to do theirbidding. VIE wanted a more arcade-styleshooter game to fill a slot in their product line,so we started developing a fast-paced, third-persondragon-flying game.It was not until early 1997 (when VIE begancutting projects just prior to closing its doors)that Surreal sold the DRAKAN concept toPsygnosis. Psygnosis saw the strength in ourteam and gave us complete freedom to perfect