we’re bringing in a fresh take on it. I’ve got a little surprise.”
Toby perked up a little, and then I saw Lisa. Her expression had changed very little, but her normally pale face was red almost to the hairline. She was watching Darren with what some might call nervousness, but it was more like hunger.
“I’ve been talking to a new person for this,” Darren said, and I saw Lisa’s posture straighten, flexing like a cat waiting to be petted. “We’re about to announce a partnership with NVIDIA, to be the flagship product for their next-gen graphics card. We’re going to get direct access to the software guys as well as their hardware team.”
I saw Lisa react. Her lips made the tiniest possible “no.” Otherwise her features didn’t change, they just went entirely slack, as if in shock. You would have to have known her a long time to catch the change. I thought I was the only one seeing it, until I saw Don’s eyes on her. Darren worked the room, but Don watched it.
Darren showed us a series of new screenshots. A waterfall with sunlight shining through it, forming a rainbow. A garishly lit nightclub where a generously proportioned, lingerie-clad woman danced on a pedestal, lit by multicolored spotlights. A domed temple with arches and gleaming black marble floors. The images looked like they’d taken a supercomputer a hundred hours to draw; they looked incredible.
Darren ticked off the list of features. “Translucency, curved surfaces, colored lights. Everything from a gamer’s wet dreams, all in real time. Bloom, specular highlights, insane poly counts, level of detail, all running at sixty frames a second, solid as a fucking rock. This is it, people.”
We were, yet again, looking across the threshold to the next thing, another phase change. Everything new this year was already becoming old, sad, and pathetic. Darren understood this so well. We were going into the future and he was taking us with him. We were the smart kids again, rich in the currency of our peculiar nation, foresight.
“And… number three,” Don said. “Scheduling.” Darren gave a quick nod, then ducked out the door while Don took us back into the mundane. Lisa followed behind Darren.
“We’re going to have about eighteen months for this one. We’ll be reusing a lot of tech, but it’s still going to be tight. Matt, could you—” Matt hopped up, and Don handed him a page of printout. He started sketching out a grid on the whiteboard on the wall.
Horizontally across the top, he wrote six items: PREPRODUCTION, ALPHA 1, ALPHA 2, ALPHA 3, BETA, and RTM.
At the right-hand edge, he wrote three words, arranged vertically: PROGRAMMING, DESIGN, and ART. These, I knew, were the three core disciplines of video game production. There was also production, which meant tracking the schedule, the budget, and doing a thousand other things, such as organizing translations for foreign publication, keeping in touch with publishers, and generally figuring out what on earth was going on at any given time. And then there was quality assurance, or playtesting, devoted to finding mistakes in other people’s work. No one was ever very fond of QA.
Don explained the schedule carefully—we’d have eighteen months for this, which put sharp limits on how much new technology we could create. I got the feeling this made the programmers feel a little pissed off. Working from the sheet, Matt began adding deadlines for each of these in neat, spiky handwriting. As Don talked us through the dates, I gradually picked up on rough meanings of the other terms.
Preproduction: planning the product and scheduling the milestones. As it would in a prolonged dorm-room discussion, the phrase “wouldn’t it be cool if” played a major part. Endless circular debates, pie-in-the-sky speculation. Lots of features that would be cut later for scheduling reasons.
Alpha phases 1, 2, and 3: building the game. This part was longer than the others put together, for obvious reasons. For most of this period, the game was going to be nonexistent or broken and decidedly unfun, and everyone would regret everything they said during preproduction.
Beta meant that the game, theoretically, was done except for all the many, many problems and mistakes and omissions.
RTM stood for “Release To Manufacturer,” when the finished master disk would be sent off to the publisher (note: we did not have a publisher). The publisher would do its own testing, and either accept it or send it back to have the problems fixed.