Intro
Drifters is a networked multiplayer game built from the ground up in Emergent Game Technologies' Gamebryo engine by student developers at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). Preproduction began with a team of 10 that eventually grew in size to 27 over the course of a seven month development cycle.
The game itself has players taking the role of sinister demons, "Drifters," who have the power to possess human hosts and jump between bodies at will. Set at the grand opening night of a mysterious museum, the game lets up to four players go head-to-head and use their powers of possession to hide amongst a crowd and take each other down. The game was completed on July 31st, 2009 and is now available for free download at driftersgame.com.
This was the first time anyone on the team had worked on such a large-scale game project, so the ordeal isn't easily condensed into ten points. That said, I've tried my best to distill the experience down to the five most notable things that went right and wrong throughout development from my standpoint as project lead (with some suggestions from my teammates). What you'll read below is far from the whole story, but hopefully it will provide a little insight into some of the biggest successes and hardships experienced by a fresh team of students making their first fully fledged PC game.
What Went Right
1. Tools to manipulate the crowd of non-player characters (NPCs)
Our efforts to implement realistic crowd behavior struggled until our team size grew and we were able to free up two dedicated programmers. But by that time, we knew it was a top priority. A crowd of more than fifty NPCs wandering our environment would no doubt require extensive testing and iteration, so rather than hard-coding things, our programmers developed several ways of giving designers direct control over its configuration.
To have the degree of control we needed over the crowd, our designers had to be able to tweak NPCs' movement paths, animations and geometry/ texture references. Eventually, they had the power to do all three. Head, torso and lower body models could all be swapped on character rigs and specific combinations could be saved out as character types in XML for maximum crowd diversity. Designers could then define crowds composed of any number or ratio of these character types and choose which one to load at the game's start. Movement paths were created by opening up the scene file of the environment and visually placing movement nodes along with specific start/stop points accompanied by animations and then assigning them to a specific NPC.
Our custom made tool to direct the movement of NPCs. (click for full size)
Once these processes were in place, the crowd evolved very quickly because we could have multiple designers working on it simultaneously, all who had direct control over every aspect of its creation. The end result is one we were very happy with, and it's really a testament to the systems that promote producer-driven content, as well as good communication between design and programming teams during their implementation. It may have taken awhile for things to get developed, but in the end we empowered designers to efficiently make changes to one of our game's most complex and integral features.
2. Sound and voice work
If there's one thing I've found to be most frequently overlooked on independent titles, it would have to be sound. We were lucky enough to overcome this common indy pitfall largely because of our access to professional voice actors and a recording studio on location.
One of our FIEA professors gathered together a large group of voice acting talent he knew from the industry and arranged an audition for local game companies that we were invited to attend, giving us the opportunity to handpick our cast from a lineup of sixty actors. We eventually narrowed it down to the five we felt were best suited to the game, and having this degree of choice when picking voices for our characters really went a long way in fleshing out the personalities of the Drifters.
Equally important to Drifters' sound was the recording studio we were given access to at FIEA. Having such a reliable meeting place to bring our voice talent made it easy to get high quality recordings and as many takes as we needed. Its location at FIEA was also incredibly convenient, as it allowed us to bring recordings into the game almost immediately after they were collected.
Of course, neither of these two assets would have benefitted us to the extent they did had we not had two designated audio designers working to coordinate all the recording efforts along with producing original music and sound effects. Having these two really ensured audio got the time and attention it deserved when it would have been all too easy to save sound work for filler tasks. The result was a musical score that set the tone of the game and characters that came alive through their voices.
