SOF Programmer Diary
I don't know if I'll ever find the rest of them, but today I happened upon one of the Programmer Diary entries I used to frequently submit to a Soldier of Fortune fan site. The timestamp on the doc is May 2002 but I'm pretty sure this is at least two years older than that. It was probably written near the end of development on SOF, the very first game I ever shipped. I was still a programmer back then and happily wrote for any website that asked. Apparently, I was getting paid by the word. Except I wasn't getting paid.
If you ask nicely I might reveal the identity of the "coworker who shall remain nameless" in the story below.
A few weeks ago I related a story from the days of SOF crunch mode (the “Saturday night bunch of losers” bit, for the handful of you that have been able to stomach more than two consecutive weeks of this series). That particular story met with such rave reviews (well, one person mentioned having enjoyed it) that I have decided to spin another tale of drama and political intrigue from The Days of SOF Crunch Mode…
It was approximately 2am. There were maybe 10 of us at the office on that fateful winter day, attempting to fix bugs, polish levels, or whatever the heck it is that game developers claim they do at 2am. I was blissfully unconscious, sneaking a quick nap on the floor of my cube, when an overpowering aroma began a slow but relentless assault on my nostrils. Having established a firm beachhead in my nose, this disturbingly unnatural odor continued its path of destruction straight through to the olfactory center of my brain, which promptly announced to my inattentive cerebellum that I was about to die. At this point the primal “fight or flight” instinct kicked in and I struggled back to a low level of awareness muttering something along the lines of, “For the love of all that is good and holy please make that smell stop.” Shortly thereafter the remainder of my senses came online and I noticed a thin layer of smoke drifting through the office like…a thin layer of smoke. I heard a collection of Ravenites excitedly discussing something in the breakroom nearby so I sought them out, hoping for an explanation. Well, I got one.
Seems as though one of our coworkers (who shall remain nameless), having returned from a late night Cub Foods run, decided to attempt a little experiment. You know those big, ready-to-bake cookies that Pillsbury sells? You’d think that the phrase “ready-to-bake” would imply to anyone who’s ever visited a kitchen that the baking of the cookie should take place in a conventional oven. Well, the aforementioned would-be chef apparently concluded that “ready-to-bake” should also include microwave ovens in the list of potential appliances. As you may have already guessed from the above paragraph’s description of sights and smells, microwave baking is absent from the cookie-preparation instructions for good reason. One thing that is not mentioned in the instructions, however, is that, after attempting a microwave-bake of the cookie, really the best thing to do is quickly remove the foul, smoking remains from the kitchen area and immediately take it outside and toss it in a snow bank. Don’t just throw it in the trash, cuz that wretched pile of simmering demon-excrement could very easily ignite the contents of a garbage can. That’s a tip, folks.
All right, story time’s over. Now I have to write about something that’s supposedly applicable to the game industry in general, SOF in particular, or preferably a sound combination of the two. I haven’t actually come up with a topic that fits that description, though, so you’ll have to settle for a quick lesson on the value of user feedback in game development.
There were several times that we had folks come in and play early alpha and beta versions of SOF, but one of the singularly most helpful (and personally satisfying) events that occurred during the development of the game was its public viewing at GenCon last summer. For the uninitiated, GenCon is a huge, internationally renowned gaming convention that takes place annually in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Traditionally a mecca for pencil-and-paper role playing gamers, GenCon has grown in recent years to include just about anything involving games of any sort. And since Milwaukee is about two hours from Raven, we’ve been able to showcase our wares at this event for the past few years.
So I’m there “manning the booth” along with several other Ravenites. We’ve got two computers running SOF, and at 10am on Thursday morning the security personnel open the main doors. A raging horde of gamers pours into the cavernous main room of the convention center. And that was the last moment that I didn’t think or talk about SOF for 8 hours. As soon as the first guy came briskly walking by and realized that a computer was publicly accessible and that it had a game running on it and that he was allowed to play the game and that the official-looking people near the computer looked like they would very much enjoy it if he did play the game…well, as soon as that happened it was non-stop crowds for the remainder of the day. Everyone “ooh’d” and “ah’d” and cringed in mock horror as they watched Ghoul pair up with various high-powered weapons and dance a very grim fandango through the gang-infested subways of New York.
I can’t properly describe the joy of having slaved over the creation of a great product and then watch as it is enjoyed for the first time by the gaming public. Let’s just say it’s a great, great feeling.
Aside from being personally enjoyable, exposing all different strata of the game-playing community to SOF was very profitable for the polishing of the game in that it allowed us to get input from hardcore gamers and casual users and everyone in between. During the four days of GenCon we literally had hundreds of folks at the booth, some of whom were clearly experienced with shooters and were able to tell us which aspects of which weapons needed work. Some of the folks who stopped by had probably never played a computer game before and they gave us some much-needed feedback regarding how the game should teach beginners certain gameplay skills. And then there was the one guy who came back every day just to use the scoped-in sniper rifle on the bad guys’ nether regions. We learned some useful things from his enjoyment of the game, too.
The bottom line, I suppose, is that I believe every opportunity should be taken to expose a game to its target audience before it ships, preferably at different stages of development. I fully realize that that’s not always possible due to time constraints and various other factors, but the polish added to the game by obtaining lots of user feedback, combined with the huge morale boost for the development team, definitely makes such exposure worthwhile.
