Flynn, about multiplayer you are correct - once a number of seats has been selected you have to start a new game to change that.
suikodan said:
Is there any way to play with only one controller?
When I first came onto the project, this was the second most important thing to me - right after getting a tutorial into the game. Once the state of the project became clear, this began to get demphasized because so many other things needed to be fixed first.
So first, we are really grateful for all the nice things being said about the game and we are very proud of what we have relseased. But let's back up...
We began as a small startup, Secret Lair Studios, building a casual MMO (actually two! but they were interrelated) and arcade titles on the side. Many of us had experiences at places like WildTangent but we even kept the arcade team separate from the main company as Grumpy Ninja.
We had board games in our plans all along. Jason Robar, who was our studio head and chief founder, is an avid board gamer. He'd gotten me turned onto board games several years earlier.
Microsoft had negotiated a bunch of boardgame licenses (Catan, Alhambra, Carcassonne) and we had a really good relationship with them owing to Robar's history. So we had, in some sense, a pick of the litter. Catan was being done by Big Huge but it wasn't on the top of our list anyways. It's really a great game - one of our favorites - but has some dynamics that are just a bit too hardcore for the audiences we wanted since we'd a very family-oriented outlook. (Fortunately, I doubt we could have done any better than Big Huge's XBLA version and we're glad to see it done so well.)
We'd had a lot of wrestling internally about what games to do. There were a couple of false starts (in fact there are still some screenshots to A_ different game that got floated around at the same time the first leaked shots from Carcassonne surfaced - we had been working on both). A couple of us had basically been arguing that just the lack of hidden information (no hand) was rare and valuable. When the dust settled, Carcassonne was all go.
But we made a mistake: placing a single producer/designer across three different arcade titles. This is really an unreasonable task for anyone to tackle. One game was being developed in our studio, one in our Shanghai studio, and one with a partner in Chile. As you can imagine, the two projects being run externally took up most of the producer's time. Carcassonne was kind of the red-headed stepchild for a while. "How hard can turning a board game into a video game be?"
Along the way we, our Shanghai studio, and even our Chilean partner (Wanako) were bought by Vivendi and re-branded "Sierra." The MMO I'd been working on was canceled and a new MMO project (that adopted many of the ideas from its predecessor) was spun up. I worked on this just briefly before being asked to move to Arcade to work on Carcassonne. "It's coming in for a landing and we just need you to guide it in." This may have been true, there was only a month left in the schedule, but someone had forgotten to put the landing gear on. This project was going to have to pull up and do a flyaround.
When I came onto the project, I had two Big Ideas™ that I felt would make this game kick ass. 1) Hotseat (one controller shared) local multiplayer. 2) An interactive tutorial. My views changes in the first two days.
Most of the core game was there - structures building, etc. - and it looked really good but there was a bunch of stuff that was in a sorry state: menus, UI, HUD, tutorial, lobbying, etc. Basically everything that supports the experience of playing the game.
Shortly after joining the project, I had a list of work items that looked something like this:
1. Menus (not optional)
2. Sounds (not optional)
3. Tutorial (not optional)
4. Controls (not optional)
5. HUD (not optional)
6. Lobbying (not optional)
7. Everything else...
The first order of business was killing our babies. There went my plan for "hot-swap" local multiplayer controls - using a single controller for multiple players - just not enough time to resolve the profile sign-in/out issues. Next, we shelved the additional, non-standard game modes and the cascade of problems/challenges they introduced.
I tackled menu flows, sounds and a tutorial design with the help of a writer. From the designs an artist created the menus, an outsource team the sounds, and an engineer the tutorial. But even at this point, we didn't have enough time in our schedule. Fortunately, Sierra and Microsoft were both very supportive and we were able to get some extra time; this was much less painful than it could have been.
Then we discovered that the tutorial we'd just finished, while completely thorough, required too much reading. (During a focus test, one guy actually set his head down like he had been beaten by an SAT!) Rather than redesign the tutorial and have an engineer rebuild it (and possibly get shivved when my back was turned), we added a script language (Lua) to the game and I scripted the tutorial myself.
That's the short story. Like any development project, we had to chose which battles to fight. But if we had to do it all over again, most of what we would do would be the same, just in a more efficient way. In the end, we built an excellent game with a new team and in less than a year. Of course, it helps to start with one of the best board games of all time; thank you Klaus Jurgen-Wrede!
I'll have to spend some more time with it, but so far a worthy purchase.
