Postmortem: Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 2
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POSTMORTEM garrett young, mario rodriguez, and chris pickford GARRETT YOUNG, MARIO RODRIGUEZ, AND CHRIS PICKFORD | Garrett’s eight-plus Microsoft years span from testing NBA FULL COURT PRESS to exec. producing the PGR series with Bizarre. Mario began testing games at Microsoft as a 2002 University of Miami grad, recently working on PGR2 and RALLISPORT CHALLENGE. Chris has been designing and testing at Bizarre for four years, shipping the PGR series and FUR FIGHTERS. 46 mar ch 2004 | game developer GAME DATA PUBLISHER: Microsoft Game Studios FULL-TIME CORE TEAM: 40 MAX TEAM SIZE (including test, licensing, localization, and other support resources): 102 LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT: 2 years RELEASE DATE: Nov 18, 2003 PLATFORM: Xbox DEVELOPMENT HARDWARE: Pentium 600MHz–2.4GHz machines with 256–1024MB RAM, GeForce 2–4 series and ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video boards. DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE: Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft SourceSafe, Alienbrain, built-in 3D Editor, Softimage XSI, Araxis Merge 2001, SoundForge PROJECT SIZE: 37,174 files, 219,538 lines of code, 41GB of data roject Gotham Racing 2 achieved our goals. is the sequel to the best- We owe that success to the strength of selling Xbox racing game, our people and the clarity of our chal- developed by Bizarre lenge. Smart, effective, hard-working peo- P Creations (Liverpool, ple are critical to achieving any worth- England) with production and publishing while goal, and our two teams had that in support from Microsoft Game Studios. spades. Though there were some disagree- Our two teams rolled directly into produc- ments and late changes in tactical direc- tion after finishing international versions tion, everyone on the team was always of PGR in February 2002. We significantly working toward a clear overall strategic expanded the scope and quality of the vision for the project. A key ingredient to combined team, bringing on new artists, our ultimate success was the strong rela- programmers, and testers. Our ultimate tionship between developer and publisher: goal for this project was to create a AAA matching Bizarre’s design, technical, and PGR title for the 2003 holiday season artistic strengths with Microsoft’s built upon the fundamental strengths of strengths in testing, licensing, usability, the PGR franchise and innovate in our creative writing, and production manage- use of the Xbox’s online system, Xbox ment. Without an extremely high level of Live. Given our on-time delivery and the trust, we would not have been able to game’s 92.4 percent average score from maximize the efforts of each team, and over 70 reviews (referenced from PGR 2 would not have been as strong. www.gamerankings.com), we feel that we Our hope is that this postmortem can w w w.gdmag.com 47 POSTMORTEM provide some insight into how we of cars (from 25 to 100) and cities (from PGR 2. We bet gamers would love racing worked together to build Project four to 11). Our artists invested signifi- online against their friends, and we Gotham Racing 2—the things that cant time in researching routes through decided to incorporate Xbox Live worked well, and the things we would do cities we felt were interesting, recogniza- Scoreboards for each race in our game. differently if we had to do it all over ble, and fun to drive. As we broadened These interactive high-score rankings again. With luck, we hope other teams the scope of the car list, we added new car allow every gamer with an Xbox Live will be able to apply these lessons to categories like classics, muscle cars, super- account to post a race result, and allow improve their processes and avoid some cars, and even SUVs. The designers also the top 10 racers to post their actual race of our pitfalls. expanded the Kudos system to increase ghost replay for anyone to download and the reward for skillful driving, adding watch (or race against). rewards for taking a “good line” through There were major challenges inherent What Went Right a corner, drafting, and navigating track in each decision. To build all the new sections cleanly (without hitting walls). cars and cities, we virtually doubled the Strong early vision for innova- But as a new PGR game, we knew we size of the original art team, which also 1.tion. In our efforts to build on had to continue to push that spirit of increased the challenges in team manage- the market success of PGR, we knew it innovation. Though Xbox Live was an ment and communication. Relying on was critical to stay true to and build on a unproven and unknown technology dur- unfinished technology from external formula gamers loved. We decided to ing our initial design planning, we com- teams created a large bottleneck in our greatly expand the number and diversity mitted to pushing the online frontier in production schedule, as we awaited their 48 mar ch 2004 | game developer ABOVE. A Porsche Carrera GT edges out a Saleen S7 on the Sydney waterfront. LEFT. A classic Porsche Carrera purrs loudly on a bridge in Yokohama. PREVIOUS PAGES. A Ferrari Challenge Stradale scares off tourists at the Duomo in Florence. vendors in France. database, e-mail, and phone calls. The During production, members of the Liverpool art team worked closely with team visited locations all around the the Redmond licensing managers on world to gather research, reference approvals and change requests from material, and recordings. We shot thou- vehicle manufacturers and other external sands of photos and hundreds of hours licensors. All members of our interna- of video in each city. We recorded real tional localization teams interacted DJs in Moscow and Tokyo. We even directly with our UI developer. made a special trip to the Promised As most teams do, we also planned Land, visiting the Ferrari plant in goals and deliverables for each milestone Maranello, Italy to photograph and over the life of the production schedule. record engine audio of the Ferrari Enzo However, it was the people we had in deliverables. We chose to accept these before it was released to the public. To place and our open communication challenges head-on, given our vision to borrow an old British saying, the sun channel team-wide that were the greatest expand the scope of the game beyond the never set on the PGR 2 team. contributors to our ability to resolve original title. Managing such a global team created issues quickly and hit our aggressive hol- many problems in communication and iday release schedule. Reducing worldwide manage- schedule management. Our approach to 2.ment. The Bizarre Creations solving these problems was to actually Proving stable online game- team included all of our core developers, reduce, rather than expand the amount 3.play early. Online multiplayer is artists, game and sound designers, and of management. We built up strong com- frequently the highest risk area for any production staff. The Microsoft team in munication channels between all mem- game, since multiplayer features can be Redmond, Washington included many bers of the team, removing the communi- the hardest to implement and require sig- production and design support staff, cation bottleneck that can occur at the nificant optimization and tuning. We licensing managers, a full test team, and producer level on game projects. All addressed this problem early by imple- the marketing team. Given the impor- members of the production support staff menting the bulk of our network code, tance of our international release, we at Microsoft were empowered to interact physics optimizations for interpolation of had localization staff working full-time directly with all of their peers and other car speed and trajectory across all boxes, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Ireland. members of the Bizarre team. The and support for all Xbox Live features We also employed 3D art vendors in Redmond testers and Liverpool develop- by early April, 2003, five months before Australia and England, and translation ers interacted directly through the bug release. Our overall multiplayer execu- w w w.gdmag.com 49 POSTMORTEM LEFT. A photograph of a bridge in Sydney. MIDDLE. A wireframe version of that bridge. RIGHT. An in-game screenshot of the bridge, tion was relatively smooth, with only the spectrum of all end users. The theory ers are required to get contractual performance and voice issues to resolve “a user is only a ‘new user’ once” pre- approval with the owners of each logo during our final code optimization phase. sumes everyone in your audience will be and likeness before releasing it in a game. We were able to achieve positive willing to struggle through a confusing With 11 cities (including a real-world results by hiring a strong network pro- interface and unbalanced difficulty levels race track), over 100 cars, unique DJs for grammer, working closely with the Xbox to experience and enjoy your game vision. each of our 33 radio stations, and over Live team to fully understand the new We had success in addressing these 300 songs, this was a monstrous task. technologies as they were being built, challenges on PGR 2, but not without We employed a team of five licensing and synchronizing our implementation serious investment of people and itera- managers over the course of the entire and test processes. Implementing a major tion time over the last few months before project to own and execute on this task, set of Xbox Live features to the require- release. We spent literally hundreds of establishing contacts and maintaining ments of the Xbox certification team hours hand-tuning each car, to balance relationships with all appropriate parties, required educating our team immediately.