Matthew Ota's Profile

What
Went Right

1.
The Irrational Development Model

2.
Use of simple, reusable game-play elements.

Concept Sketches of the Cyborg Midwife

The
field of companies developing first-person shooters like id and Valve, among
others, is impressive. From the outset we realized that we would have to work
smarter, not harder, to make a game that could stand up in this market. It would
be a futile attempt to create scarier monsters, bigger guns, or higher-polygon
environments. Additionally, we realized that our design time and budget were
very tight and that we would not have time to carefully hand-script complicated
game-play sequences in the engine. Instead, in an attempt to shift the
battlefield, we chose to focus on simple, reusable game-play elements. The
success of Half-Life, which launched while we were in the middle of
System Shock 2 confirmed our intuitions in this respect. We simply didn't
have the time, resources or technology to develop the scripted cinematic
sequences used by Half-Life. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge
that we were not even trying to do so.

This
strategy melded very well with our acquisition of the System Shock
license, as the original System Shock had already been down this road. We
decided to expand on elements that we liked in System Shock and then add
similar new systems. Each such new system was evaluated rigorously in terms of
game-play benefits, underlying technology, and design-time requirements.

For
example, take the ship's security system. Early on we decided that we wanted to
continue the surveillance theme from System Shock, which we could
leverage throughout the game to provide lots of game play for very little
implementation cost. We realized that security cameras would be trivial to
implement using existing AI systems (they are just AIs pruned of many of their
normal abilities) and that once we had cameras that could spot and track the
player, we would be able to build several game-play elements out of them.
Cameras could summon monsters to the player, so much of the game play consisted
of avoiding detection by security cameras and destroying cameras before you were
seen. Because cameras scan fixed arcs, the player can utilize timing to sneak by
cameras, pop out and shoot them at the right moment, or get underneath them and
bash them with a melee weapon. Once a player is spotted, monsters flood the area
until the player is able to shut off the security system somehow or the system
times out. This introduces the need to deactivate security systems via security
computers that are scattered throughout the level.

This
type of system was technologically simple to implement and required minimal
design effort. While not completely formulaic, the basic procedure to set up a
camera and security system could be shown to designers quickly using a few
simple rules. From this one system and a couple of associated subsystems, we
derived a large amount of game play without having designers create and
implement complicated scripted sequences and story elements. When you throw
together many such systems (as we did), you end up with a lot of game play.

3.
Implementing scripted sequences

Xerxes, central computer of the Von Braun

Motivated by the dramatic scripted sequences in Half-Life, we
attempted to introduce similar elements into System Shock 2. In doing so,
we broke one of our rules: we tried to step outside the bounds of our
technology. Although we attempted relatively simple sequences and ultimately got
them working, they were time sinks, and the payback was relatively slight. For
example, we scripted a hallucinatory sequence in which the player character
rides through the interior of the alien boss-monster, known as the Many. This
so-called "Many ride" was the source of innumerable bugs -the player would be
thrown off the moving platform, manage to kill his projected self, bump into
walls, and so on. We confirmed our intuition that the Dark Engine does not
support complex scripted sequences well because the toolset (AI, moving terrain,
and animation) is not optimized for this sort of behavior. The moral is, once
again, to work with your technology, not against it.

Perhaps
the rudest shock in our level building process came from our misunderstanding of
what part of the process would prove to be most difficult. Architectural work
was actually fairly simple, because we intentionally kept our spaces fairly
clean and did not attempt anything too unusual. However, placing and
implementing our objects was far more complex and involved than we expected. One
difficulty that we encountered was educating our designers in what was expected
from them in terms of game-play implementation. Most of our level builders had
previously built Quake or Unreal levels and were not familiar with
the style of game play that we were trying to build in System Shock 2.
Partially this was because we were simply exploring a style of game play that we
did not entirely understand ourselves. But it reflected a failure on our part to
properly educate the designers. Building prototypical spaces, looking at past
games and conducting more intensive discussions about game play will all be part
of our future projects.

Our
other major design hurdle was the instability and inscrutability of Dromed, the
Dark Engine editor. Dromed is a cantankerous beast and many man-months were
spent struggling with its idiosyncrasies. Perhaps our biggest problem stemmed
from the lack of support in one crucial area - the part of the engine concerned
with translating the designer-placed brushes into the basic world
representation. Like many complex 3D engines, the Dark Engine suffers from
troubling epsilon issues (data errors caused by rounding inaccuracies) and other
glitches that crop up during level compilation. Because the programmer who
implemented the basic renderer and world representation was not available during
the majority of the System Shock 2 development cycle, we had to work
around these problems. It was often a frustrating process when the fundamental
cause of the problems was not even known. Over time we developed a set of
heuristics to avoid the majority of the glitches, but we were forced to lock
down much of the level architecture before we wanted to in order to ensure
stability.

“We’re all fans. We all play,” said Brack, who averages 15 hours playing
World of Warcraft each week.

3. MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS

4. GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

5. DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CUSTOMERS

To show Blizzard’s devotion to this principle, CEO Morhaime and other
executives listed the titles of canceled games Blizzard had worked on: Nomad,
Raiko, Warcraft Adventures, Games People Play, Crixa, Shattered Nations, Pax
Imperia, and Denizen.

“We don’t have a 100 percent hit rate. We just cancel all the ones that
aren’t going well,” Morhaime said.

“Failure begets success,” intellectual property attorney St. George said.
“Many successful companies and CEOs have noted that their best successes have
come from failures. The lessons learned from failures will provide the stepping
stones for the next innovation.”

7. MOVE QUICKLY, IN PIECES

At Blizzard, small teams focus on narrow elements of the game. For example,
different teams of artists specialize in trees, rocks, the game environment, and
monsters, said lead producer Brack.

Multi-disciplinary “strike teams” serve as critics of how the different
aspects of the game work together.

“We could ship a sub-par game, but ultimately it hurts the brand. We should
ship it when it’s ready or we shouldn’t ship it at all,” said Pearce, the
executive vice president of product development. “It’s an issue of making sure
we’re not risking long-term gain for short-term benefits.”