Rise of Nations stats

[sabotai]

Not sure if anyone would find this interesting at all, but I thought I'd post it since I know there are several people here who play Rise of Nations.

I just got the July issue of Game Developer magazine and they had an article of the game.

Number of Full Time Developers: 26
Number of Contractors: 16
Length of Developement: 3 years

Developement Software used:
Boundschecker, Altova XMLSpy, Araxis Merge, MacroExpress,
PCLint, 3DS Max, Character Studio, MS Developer Suite 6.0,
Perforce Source Control, Xoreax Incredibuild, Visual Assist,
Workspace Whiz, Alexsys Team, Adobe Photoshop,
Adobe Premiere, Intel VTune

Project Size:

*.C, *.CPP, *.H :
1,721 total source files
837,939 total lines
24,610,233 total bytes

*.BHS :
46 total files
24,330 total lines
966,289 total bytes

Here is a list of things they said went right and what went wrong (just to note, these are basically from Brian Reynolds, president of Big Huge Games)

(another note, some of you may not understand some of these. I'm not going to rewrite the whole article. :) Also, these are more of a business what went right and wrong and not a game what went right and wrong, if that makes any sense)

What Went Right:
1) Prototype method of game design
2) Choosing the right publisher
3) Disciplined hiring process
4) Developing powerful in-house tools
5) Great third-party productivity tools

What Went Wrong:
1) Not listening to all the other Postmortems ever printed in Game Developer (Postmortem is the title of the series of articles done on games)
2) No clear idea of the kind of game we were making (I'm sure A agrees with this one. :) )
3) Hard time finding the look from the art perspective
4) Solo scenario meltdown (Reynolds talks about how their first design for the solo-scenario died a horrible death and that they had to redo it)
5) Refusal to acknowledge the true state of the game in the final months (Reynolds talks about how they pushed themsevles too hard to fix bugs in the final months. He called it the "death march" that just drained his team completely)

I hope this interested at least one person. :)

[Franklinnoble]

Interesting... I guess. I still think Reynolds should have made a TBS game. I play RON, and while it does a lot of cool things that other RTS games don't do, I still prefer the TBS genre over RTS.

[Anrhydeddu]

2) No clear idea of the kind of game we were making (I'm sure A agrees with this one. )

:)

It has become my strong opinion (do I have any other kinds?) that a game needs to have significant time investment in order for it to be a classic or at least, sustained playability. RoN appears to be a very quality game but with the emphasis on short playability, it just doesn't stick with some gamers. This was the trap that SimGolf and other games like that fell into, like a round of poker or solitare. Compare that a standard Civ/Total War/Sid Meiers game, or a RPG game, or a career-based sports sim. All require dozens of hours to play and with that level of investment (assuming that one likes them and sticks them out), it becomes an epic gaming experience. I bring this up because I have been noticing elsewhere that folks are running out things to do in RoN. While there are endless options to chose from, some folks by now have played 20-50 games. Contrast that a game like Medieval Total War where in that same time period, most would be lucky to get 1 or 2 games completed. Nothing wrong with either approach but the relatively short gaming of RoN has appears to be burning people out.

[Franklinnoble]

You hit the nail right on the head, Anrhy... I've had RON for a few weeks, haven't even played it that much, but I feel like I've done just about all I can with it.

On the other hand, I still play Civ3 from time to time, and it never really gets old for me.

[Calis]

I'll also agree with that short term.

I bought it, loved it...haven't played it in weeks, nor had the urge to.

Of course, I tend to do that with most games these days, I swear my attention span grows shorter and shorter as the years pass by, which is the opposite of what I thought it would do. :)

Some neat info though.