Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, Fable. Bigger is better, right? With special thanks to GTA3, too many devlopers look for the bullet-points on the back of the box: free roaming open-city, 50 hours of gameplay, realtime day-to-night transitions. There is commonly held belief that the player wants more. More content, extended gameplay, graphics wow-factor that has no impact on core gameplay. Is there room in the budget for all these things, probably not and it’s the game itself that suffers.
There is no feature, no asset, no line of code that doesn’t have a cost. Everything is a series of trade-offs. For every extra feature that goes into the box, you should ask why and how much. If a new feature, let’s say you want to add pedestrians walking dogs–just for ambiance. Additionally, let’s say that everything else in your game is bipedal. To add the dog you will need the art assets for the dog, a custom animation rig for the dog, and special AI to handle the dog-walking. You may even need special code to handle the leash (bending and flexing). You’ll need work from a modeler, a rigger, an animator, and at least one engineer. With implementation and testing you’re looking at at least four weeks. A simplified budget of $10K per man-month (this includes salary and overhead) results in a cost of $40K. For a dog. On a leash. That has no impact on gameplay. Bear in mind, that this is also one man-month that is not used for core game-play features.
This may sound quite a bit like feature-creepism, but the key difference here is that these features are included in the plan from the beginning. There is always a big list of “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” features that are added to the schedule at the beginning of the project: dynamic weather systems, ambient AI, etc. Not only do these features not have any real impact on the game in question, but they are invariably cut due to time constraints. But they are only cut after a significant initial investment of time and resources.
If you spend 100% of your time working on 65% of the planned project then you only have 65% of a game. If you stick to only those features that are necessary you can spend 100% on nearly 100% of your game. Recent titles in the “of war” genre, “God of War” and “Gears of War” are both excellent examples of features focused only on active elements of the game. You can see this reflected in both reviews and sales.
Tags: game design, open-world