Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: The Lie of "IP"

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:8/31/2000; 1:39:43 PM
Topic:The Lie of "IP"
Msg #:20605 (In response to 20600)
Prev/Next:20604 / 20606

Jim Stegman: Zzzzing! You got me.

Thanks Paul, for bringing me back to earth! ;-)

Thanks for taking the comment in the spirit in which it was intended!

Jim: I admit that I haven't checked out any of the games in the open source community. I'm sure the engines you have cited are as good or better than the commercial ones.

Well, by their nature, they're evolving, and some have been around longer than others. I cited the two that I happen to feel are most mature and feature-impressive and, perhaps not coincidentally, that have relatively robust concrete game efforts around them.

Jim: But there is alot more to a game than just the code. I just can't imagine how the open source community could create a game with the depth, consistancy, and playability of Diablo. Maybe I don't have a very good imagination.

I should share my bona-fides here: once upon a time I worked at a little company called ICOM Simulations, Inc. that did a series of graphical adventure games for the Mac: Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Deja Vu II. I was a playtester for Shadowgate and lead developer for Deja Vu II.

Much later on in life, I worked for Activision. I wrote a quick-and-dirty utility for the Mechwarrior 2 team, maintained the Mac port of the MADE story-game engine, and was one of only two programmers who did the port of "Spycraft: The Great Game" to the Macintosh. So I've been around the game development industry for a while.

There's considerable truth to your observation, I think. In particular, I feel that having a distributed development team would present significant hurdles to achieving the cohesion that a good game exhibits. But I don't know that this is absolutely true, either; in particular it seems that once a game engine (and perhaps the initial set of scenarios/maps) is largely in the bag, there are more opportunities for far-flung artists, level designers, and coders to create new levels/scenarios/maps/etc. for the engine. This must perforce be at least true to some degree—witness some of the more ambitious third-party "mod" or, even more so, "total conversion" efforts around highly popular game engines such as the Quake or Unreal families.

So I think the issue is one of effectively launching a distributed cooperative development effort once you've found a group of highly talented, extremely motivated people who won't find the geographical distance from their teammates an insurmountable burden when the confusion/boredom/ennui sets in after, say, six months of development with nothing concrete to show for it (which, unless your name is John Carmack, tends to be how game development is).

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