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Exclusive - Deus Ex: Invisible War Dev Diary#5 Feature
Chris Leyton
05/03/2004
Chris Carollo, Lead Programmer on Deus Ex: Invisible War takes a look at the finished product in our final developer diary…
5. - Pre-post-mortem. A discussion of the process of development. How has the game taken shape? Any big surprises in development? How has the scope of the game changed throughout the process?
Chris Carollo, Lead Programmer
Development of Deus Ex: Invisible War can generally be characterized as having three distinct phases:
- Initial technical development and game design discussion.
- Wrap-up of most of the technical features and the implementation of the core gameplay.
- Finishing and honing the game, getting everyone into the mentality of getting the game to a level of quality that we were happy shipping.
During the first phase, we pretty much started with a huge design document that contained everything from general ideas about how DX:IW should feel and what the core gameplay experience should be, to very specific descriptions of tools and biomods in the game. Obviously at the beginning of the project this contained a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas that could have been great fun but werenât feasible for one reason or another â“ typically technical or scheduling practicalities. While this was going on, we were busy making the changes to the Unreal engine that we thought were necessary to create DX:IW as weâd envisioned. We replaced the AI system with a more sensory-based model, we wrote a new sound system to allow players and AIs to hear realistically propagated audio, and we replaced the renderer to allow us to support dynamically shadowed environments.
As development proceeded and the core game began to come together, we could start ot see which of these items really worked within the context of the larger game. Additionally, we could make better decisions about what we wanted to do with our new technology and what was possible with it. Learning how to effectively use such new technology was difficult â“ often specs and expectations would change, and there was a long gradual process of adaptation that really continues almost up to the point where we were shipping the game.
Finally we came to the six months or so of the project where we really buckled down and got serious about shipping the game. Though past experience had demonstrated how powerful this phase of development can be, it was nonetheless surprising just how much we accomplished during this time. Knowing that you can no longer rely on âgetting toâ things and youâre no longer able to âdo it laterâ means that everything thatâs accomplished needs to be solid and shippable. After many months of underlying development, the designers and artists finally knew exactly what they had to work with and were comfortable enough with the strengths and weaknesses of those tools to know exactly what they could accomplish.
Luckily, just as we got to this point, the game was coming together to a point where it really became fun, and a genuine sense of excitement began to develop within the team. Members of other teams inside Ion Storm began playtesting the game and, in addition to the helpful feedback they provided, they marveled at the strides we were making.
Especially in a game like DX:IW where thereâs a bit of a âkitchen sinkâ mentality, this time was incredibly valuable from a winnowing perspective. Features that werenât working in the game were discarded, and there was lots of valuable brainstorming for things that could be safely and easily added to the game based on how it was playing or what it was lacking. There were a few features that, because of our flexible data-driven object system, we could add simply by dropping in new art or tuning values at the very last minute. For example, we realized that we make unique weapon variants by tuning existing weapons and their projectiles, so players can now look for custom variants of almost all the weapons sprinkled throughout DX:IW.
Deus Ex: Invisible War is released today on Xbox and PC; look out for a review later todayâ¦
