Chittagong
Gold Member
Didn't see this excellent doc posted yet here, found it in the other forum.
http://research.microsoft.com/asia/ur/workshop05/downloads/Game Development At Microsoft.pdf
It's a presentation of some of the learnings from Halo 2 development. Some notes from me:
- All of Bungie works on one game only
- From scratch to end of preproduction 6 - 12 months
- Game takes 15 - 27 months to complete
- Considering Bungie started the new game in 10/2004 (disregarding any time off), the game could be in a teaser form (preproduction done, GDD + TDD ready) for X05.
- However, the exhaustion of the team and the learning curve of the new platform could push this back further
- The earliest theoretical release date for a new Bungie game according to the process is Q1/2006, latest Q1/2007. My money is on Christmas 2006.
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EDIT: Shit. Bad maths day. Should be 70 people in the topic, not 60.
http://research.microsoft.com/asia/ur/workshop05/downloads/Game Development At Microsoft.pdf
It's a presentation of some of the learnings from Halo 2 development. Some notes from me:
- All of Bungie works on one game only
- From scratch to end of preproduction 6 - 12 months
- Game takes 15 - 27 months to complete
- Considering Bungie started the new game in 10/2004 (disregarding any time off), the game could be in a teaser form (preproduction done, GDD + TDD ready) for X05.
- However, the exhaustion of the team and the learning curve of the new platform could push this back further
- The earliest theoretical release date for a new Bungie game according to the process is Q1/2006, latest Q1/2007. My money is on Christmas 2006.
Halo 2 Dev Team
- Relatively small engineering team
- Artist to engineer ratio roughly 2:1
- Lean management structure and very low overhead
- Entire studio is focused on one game
Halo 2 Dev Team Makeup
Engineers 16
Producers 4
Artists 25
Designers 5
Others 20
Development Process at Bungie
Concept and Prototypes (3-6 mo.)
- Story, art vision, technology R&D
Pre-Production (3-6 mo.)
- Core systems, production pipeline and tools
Production (6-12 mo.)
- Levels, characters, sound, game scripting
Finalization (3 mo.)
- Gameplay balancing, testing and bug fixes
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R&D Case #1
Halo 2 Stencil Shadow Engine - Xbox
- Cast and receive shadow properly for everything
- Stencil shadow volumes - a seemingly trivial approach
- Not trivial at all for the complex and large environment of Halo 2
- Development lasted over a year due to large number of special cases
- Xbox fillrate can not support the rendering performance
- Eventually replaced by shadow buffer solution
- Triggered a major overwrite of the graphics engine
EDIT: Shit. Bad maths day. Should be 70 people in the topic, not 60.