Every year, GDC is the highlight of the
conference season for me. It's absolutely the most fun event I have
to attend. It's not just the yearly conference game, though those are
always terrific (Thanks Game Lab). It's the flood of interesting
talks and new ideas that keeps me latched on at the rim, looking
inward jealously. As my day job requires me to write about enterprise
software development, it's sometimes tough to find reasons to stay at
the show for more than a day.
But there are crossovers. Software
design on the broad scale is similar in both worlds, and it's only
becoming moreso. Monday, I popped in for the Serious Games Summit.
This event concentrates on the small but growing market for corporate
training in the form of video games. Alcoa built such a game to train
its forklift drivers. Other serious games have tackled firefighting,
urban water distribution and, of all things, gerrymandering.
Another area where things overlap is in
the test and build distribution/management worlds. The game folk have
very difficult restraints on their debug and test worlds. They're
bound to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony for the actual debug consoles.
Yeah, you read that right, debug consoles. They can't simply take
last night's build, attach a debugger and go to town on their
desktops. Every debug console has a price tag attached. A very high
one.
This is why big game companies
basically contract out to smaller design studios, who then send
builds in to a big pool of testers on the corporate side. This is
usually tied to a milestone, with which ya'll are familiar. In the
enterprise world, those are just called deadlines. Or milestones. Or
stories. Or requirements fulfillment.
One interesting disparity between the
gaming world and the business world is the lack of open source in
games. No one uses Eclipse to build games. No one works on a free
engine, save for some professional cranks. I'm looking at you Dustin! There are open-source games, of course, such as the Battle for Westnoth (version 1.6
just dropped!), and a whole slew of older games that have been set
loose. There-in will the open source future of games lie: old game engines given freely to the public. Kinda like the hotrodders of the 50's.
As a result, Perforce and DevTrack are
quite popular here. Not that there's anything wrong with those
products, but few folks here outside of the smallest of dev houses
use Bugzilla.
I should revise my prior statement to
say that some developers do use Eclipse. The open-source movement
has been slow to take off in the video game world thanks to tightly
controlled debug and development environments.
One very humorous result of all these
shenanigans is that all game developers use Visual Studio, even those
working on Sony Playstation games.
There are other things in the game
world that just don't make sense, when you look at them from a
development standpoint. Nintendo, for example, has the world's most
popular gaming console right now. We've all seen the Wii. In fact,
it's old news now.
That's probably because Nintendo did
absolutely nothing to help third-party developers. It's internally
developed games are highly exciting and well designed. But all that
code is kept inside. When you develop a Wii game, you start with a
blank canvas. Pure white. Not even a controller stack. There is some
sample code to show how a controller is accessed and poled, but
that's it. Explains why we're all still playing Wii Sports, eh?
Microsoft, on the other hand, performs
as you'd expect: They take very good care of their developers. Lots
of documentation, lots of support options. Sony has aped this as
well, though both companies have become more restrictive of their
online distributed content than they have been of their boxed titles.
So, putting on my deep-thinking cap,
I'd surmise that open source will slowly creep into games, much more
slowly than it has elsewhere. When it finally arrives, there might
emerge an open console standard of some sort or other. But don't
expect it in the next five years.