Post Mortem of another Failed Project

Having been a member and owner of TGE for just over 2 years now I've yet to actually complete a game and at the end of yet another unfinished project I find myself reflecting on the time spent and to write up a post mortem of what happened for my own memory but also to perhaps aid others

For me Game development isn't a career choice, I have my career which started as a coder and has since moved in a management role, Game development is a hobby, a chance to spend time doing something I enjoy - Coding! I've worked on a number of games none of which have actually been finished, not due to my lack of committment or enthusiasm I might add but for the most part due to a team that broke apart.

The story starts as I set to find a project/team that looked as if it had the drive and commitment to actually finish a project, having already worked on two games that went nowhere in the end. Not wanting to waste time again I looked around various forums for teams that were looking for coders to join, what I found was project after project looking for coders to develop the next greatest MMORPG, the one to topple World of Warcraft (I'm sure many of us are familiar with the idea), I should also mention it's not really a genre I'm particularly keen upon.

A few other projects for games in different genres were looking but they were the one man band operations I'm sure many of us have seen - the type where I've an idea, have scribbled some sketches and notes but that's as much of a clue as they've got for how to actually turn that into a finished product.

Then I made my first mistake I gave in and signed up to develop a MMORPG, even with knowing just how big an undertaking it would be and the limited chance of it ever being completed, I wasn't completely foolish and did pick the project I thought looked like it was going somewhere, they'd been together for a number of months and had a strong game design document, skill charts, some very good 2d art and Gui mock ups, concept art for the game - all of the things I've seen missing so many times.

The team of around 14-15 people included one or two other coders and the rest were either game design or artists. It started well, ideas were good, we worked to get Forums, SVN repositories and development servers up and running... however looking back I should have spotted something, there were 14-15 people on the project but virtually all of this was either produced by Jason or myself.

Jason was the guy with the original idea, he was leading the project, working on 2d and 3d art, Lead Artist, Lead Design and dabbling with the coding side also and someone with more drive and ambition than I'd seen on any other project, given the chance I'd work with him again on a different project. However, if you've not spotted it already let me highlight what should have been another alarm bell, Jason had too many roles for a project of this magnitude to succeed and couldn't dedicate enough of his time to any one thing to prove successful at it.

For a period though it didn't seem to matter much and for a few months things went along well, although I was the only coder actually doing anything we continued to hunt for others. We reached a point where I had gotten a working Engine - a master server and TGE dedicated server running 24/7 on our linux development machine with TGE 1.5.2, AFX and MK for the client. Functionality was moving along nicely too, players could login, create themselves an account and character all of which was stored in a server side mysql database, all databases access was event driven and happening in a seperate thread and the player could then login to game with their stored character, model & name.

I was feeling pleased, to get this far had been a challenge having never done any form of multi-threaded programming I'd gotten it working, admittedly it was based on the event driven database resource here on GG but I'd made some significant improvements to the code.

It was at this point I first started to realise that things weren't quite right - I'd been focused on getting my part up and running so that we had a working prototype and the team could meet in-game to look at, tryout and play with any new features/artwork, etc. I stopped to think what next? then realised we had no plan, I work in I.T. for a living where a commonly used phrase is "Fail to plan and you plan to fail", I could see where it was headed.

So I stepped back a little from the detail and started to look at what had been achieved, I had a working engine, Jason had mocked up some Gui design a basic mission file and a few buildings and the stories behind the game had been developed a little but that was it, no real artwork and virtually no progress made. Another point worth noting, it's easy to get sucked into the detail of things and forget the bigger picture, you need that person sitting back coordinating the effort and not being caught in the day-to-day detail.

We'd had a team but only two of us were actually doing anything, Jason tried to pull together a team meeting several times to engage the others but few attended and the 14-15 people quickly dwindled to 3-4 and in the end a personal problem for Jason meant he couldn't devote time to the project either.

And so it folded and the project died... I continued a little to understand just how much we'd have to achieve to release a fully functioning MMORPG and looking at it even with the work we'd done we'd barely scratched the surface.

So for any that ever consider embarking on such a project I issue a warning - do you really have any idea of what it takes to deliver a finished product?

Here's what I learnt:
- You need a strong committed team.
- You need defined roles that people can manage.
- You need a leader that will keep up motivation and hassle people to commit to deadlines.
- You need to design - not just a story or an idea but to design everything, for example the game architecture - where will it run? how will it run i.e. Zoned Servers?, number of users?, everything you can think of.
- You need a plan, you really need a plan.
- You need experience, there are some serious technical obstacles to overcome and not things that the average Indie developer will be able to achieve on their own.
- If you must develop that MMORPG seriously consider the MMOKIT, you'll need all the head starts you can get.

The list could go on but to summarize you really need a lot lot lot more than a good idea. I have one last question to anyone reading this and still thinking they could write an MMORPG - Have you actually finished a game before?

By finished I mean given to other people to play and worked through the bugs, problems and tweaks that would come back? If the answer is No then you're doomed to fail. Think of it another way, in everything new in life we take little steps first before running that applies right from learning to walk and talk right through to the human race discovering electricity - we didn't start by trying to build a nuclear reactor.

Is game development any different to everything else in life? NO it's not. Start small, learn, develop then grow. REPEAT. That way you'll get their in the end.

Still want to write that MMO? Good luck my friend you're going to need it.