Thread: A journey to nowhere

  1. #1
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    A journey to nowhere

    I've been posting in the Top Secret forums for the new game that Acclaim is supposedly making and have found one huge problem.

    Everyone has great ideas but not everyone's ideas can be implemented. In fact they have covered what I think would be like 20 games not 1 game.

    I'm sort of nervous about this b/c with so many people on a dev team there is bound to be a complete loss of focus and eventually loss of interest.

    Focus, focus, focus. Without it, projects die. How are they going to manage 23,500 members and end up with a centralized focus for 1 game?

    Anyone else posting there?
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 03-30-2007 at 12:17 AM.

  2. #2
    Lean Mean Coding Machine KONI's Avatar
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    I signed up not so long ago and still waiting for my email ...

  3. #3
    and the hat of int overfl Salem's Avatar
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    I've not joined, so this is guesswork.

    I imagine that attrition rates will be pretty high early on as large numbers of people drift away for whatever reason.

    I would hope that after the numbers settle down, the project will fragment into various interest groups (AI, graphics, sound, combat, weapons etc etc). The real trick will be making sure the interfaces between these groups are well specified and documented so that when things are brought together, there's a passing chance of something working.
    If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
    If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.

  4. #4
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    AFAIK, at the end of the day there is a professional team behind this. Now, these 23,500 "members" can wax lyrical all they like but I'm pretty sure that the boss will pick out one particular marketable theme and that will be it, all other ideas will be binned.

    Then the next round begins, for the content of particular sections...

  5. #5
    Its hard... But im here swgh's Avatar
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    Did Acclaim make rainbow islands or was that ocean software? I can'r remember, good game back then in the 80's. I had it on my Commadore 64.

    As to the post, id say that like suggested, the main man is the boss of the project, so the lead programmer will have the final say on what goes into the game. Like Salem said, all the different acspects of the game have a seperate group of poeple, and when a game is first in production, id expect many of the coders, designers ect have their own personal ideas of how a game "should" be designed in their eyes.

    At the end of the day, it all boils down the the people who hand out the paychecks. Personal taste on how a game should be implemented should be kept quiet, unless it really is a marvel of a brain storm that the entire dev team agress upon.
    Double Helix STL

  6. #6
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Well it seemed like a good idea but it's ending up looking like a huge mess of ideas with no substance. It's hard enough getting 3 people to agree on anything, much less 23,500.

  7. #7
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    Acclaim's secret forums? New game they're working on?
    Did I miss anything?

  8. #8
    Slave MadCow257's Avatar
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    Yes, there was a thread about a project at acclaim which heavily uses community generated content

    http://topsecret.acclaim.com/

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