I will decide on the team no later than tonight and provide an in depth briefing on the game design and the projected player experience and the curve that we currently have planned. I would expect you to start thinking about it overnight and provide some feedback on the briefing and any first, rough ideas you might have come up with or are toying with. Very informal at first, not much expected on this first day. Later that night, I would expect you to hop back on email, read the exchanges and provide any further ideas you may have had during the day and react to the ideas of others. This would continue on Tues and Weds, taking an hour of active time a day.
On Weds I will take the best of our ideas into my design meeting with my team and two developer friends(we sit in on each others design meetings in an effort to grow ourselves and the industry) and go over what we came up with. We will vet the ideas, looking for any flaws or conflicts between the current design and the theoretical design proposed by our session. We will then white board play sessions using the new modifications. During this phase we verbally walk through a game, step by step and figure out how the changes would play out.
Whatever changes make it through this stage get coded into a dynamic build and tested. We play these versions around 2 dozen times total between us and take many notes. Then we check the recorded performance data of the games and try to get a picture of the overall impact, such as changes to game length, changes to time between player actions, changes in time to reach various stages and finally the rate of acquisition(for money, cargo and special weapons and achievements). We make any last final fine tuning based on this and then we would turn it over to others for testing.
While we are working on this, the rest of my team is running the second half of this process on the AI which I also am participating in. In fact, I've been up all night testing a new branch. It's not an improvement to the one you all have. It has more stuff, but it's not better. It would be a huge help if everyone who has less than 2GB RAM let's me know. That's our target for bare minimum specs. It will run on MANY CPU combos, memory is the biggest issue now that we have 2 map choices and 170 countries, 10 + Arms Dealers AI, 340+ weapons w/images, 170+ general portraits, etc etc.
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Topic: Arms Dealer - Back from the Dead (Read 56378 times)