Postmortems From Game Developers

Surreal Software’s DRAKAN: ORDER OF THE FLAME 34time on the mesh of anaffected object. After a time,the particles would fall tothe ground and stick for abit. All these properties,from the timings to the particletexture, are configurable.With this feature attheir disposal, the designerscreated glowing aurasaround ghosts by increasingthe particle size andmaking the stick-time infinite.They created snow thatlanded on invisible platformsto guide playersacross them. The snoweffect was attached toarrows to drop ice behindthem as they flew. All thisfrom a small bit of programming.Colored conceptual sketch of aWartok grunt.The engine also has an efficientcaching system, so it’sable to handle hundreds ofmegabytes of data on ourminimum system requirementof 32MB RAM. The two main characters,Rynn and Arokh, total more than 20MB of animations,plus 12MB of sounds (including ingamecut-scenes). To pull this off, the systemkeeps the most recently used sounds or animationsin the cache and can flush memory that ithasn’t used in a long time. Further reduction ofmemory usage is achieved by sharing animationsbetween characters with the same skeleton,even if they have completely different skins.The system only loads the data that it needs, asit needs it. This is importantduring development, as artistsand designers are proneto leave unused textures,sounds, and models in adatabase. The result is goodengine performance duringdevelopment, which is alsorepresentative of the finalproduct.We tried to ensure that theengine and tools always displayedto the artists anddesigners something thatwas representative of thefinal game (WYSIWYG).The best example of thiswas our real-time 3D editingsystem. The engine was integratedinto the editor, so anygeometry, texture mapping,or lighting changes made bythe designer would beimmediately reflected in the3D view. The importance ofthis aspect of the toolsshould be emphasizedbecause it gave the designers the ability to tunelevels and game play very quickly and with aminimum of guesswork.4. Compelling designA good design will not only sell a game—it canalso help smooth the development process. TheDRAKAN world has immense possibilities, sonew ideas were born easily within its scope. Thiskept the team highly motivated, as there were