Games, postmortem, live forever

September 24, 2010 10:36 PM

Games industry news site Gamasutra regularly posts "postmortems," features by game developers talking about what went right and what went wrong during the development of a game. They are remarkably candid and offer a close look at how the games were made, and often focus on awesome obscure and/or independent games. Some of the best: Dejobaan Games' AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Erik Svedäng's Blueberry Garden, ACE Team's Zeno Clash, Square Enix's The World Ends With You, Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy, and Defense of the Ancients. The one for Deadly Premonition (previously) is unfortunately not available for free online, but there are highlights and an interview. Also great: Where Realtime Worlds went wrong, a series of blog posts about the problems surrounding the currently-flopping MMO APB.

Some of those problems in APB's development show up in the postmortem for Realtime Worlds' Crackdown.

Some bigger games to get the treatment are Double Fine's Brutal Legend, Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Naughty Dog's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Irrational Games' Bioshock.

posted by The Devil Tesla (24 comments total)

You've added an "l" to Gamasutra.
posted by eyeballkid at 10:43 PM on September 24, 2010

I am best at spelling!
posted by The Devil Tesla at 10:44 PM on September 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

You linked to Deadly Premonition instead of Indigo Prophecy, but thanks, because I'll probably read both.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:45 PM on September 24, 2010

I believe things are fixed. Also, Deadly Premonition fuck yeah.
posted by cortex at 11:04 PM on September 24, 2010

These are terrific - and I say that as a non-gamer.
posted by smoke at 11:24 PM on September 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ooh, looking forward to the APB postmortem. From what I understand, pretty much nothing went right except forming the basic idea of the game.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:38 PM on September 24, 2010

Hm, I skipped Aaaaaaa! because of the lackluster demo, but after reading the postmortem I might give it another chance.
posted by joedan at 11:59 PM on September 24, 2010

Gamasutra is a fun resource. When the postmortems come off without too much PR adultery they can be damn fascinating.

They also provide many articles that can be neat for the technical types. I suspect the other game development disciplines get similar treatment.

Also, I'd caught the Luke Halliwell/APB posts after seeing it linked on gamedevblogs.net. It's fairly new and the quality of links range from meh to fairly-neat depending on area of interest.
posted by EmptyK at 12:04 AM on September 25, 2010

fun!
posted by The Whelk at 1:50 AM on September 25, 2010

Ha. Now the Deadly Premonition link goes to Indigo Prophecy, and the Indigo Prophecy link goes to Deadly Premonition.
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 2:34 AM on September 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

joedan: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! was one of the most enjoyable games of 2009. It's definitely worth the $10 it's currently on sale for. They take a simple concept and turn it into a whole world of surreal oddness between the gaps in already entertaining gameplay. The menu system is actually fun. I'm not sure how many games I've ever said that about.
posted by public at 2:52 AM on September 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was gonna play games (CIV V) this morning, not read about them. Oh well.

Thanks
posted by Mick at 4:40 AM on September 25, 2010

Tale of Tales' The Graveyard actually has a really great postmortem.
posted by pinothefrog at 6:19 AM on September 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

These are terrific - and I say that as a non-gamer.

Likewise. In fact, I'm surprised this isn't a double.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:17 AM on September 25, 2010

"currently-flopping" seems pretty generous for already dead APB
posted by graventy at 7:53 AM on September 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ha. Now the Deadly Premonition link goes to Indigo Prophecy, and the Indigo Prophecy link goes to Deadly Premonition.

Good god, how did I manage that? Fixed fixed.
posted by cortex at 8:34 AM on September 25, 2010

"currently-flopping" seems pretty generous for already dead APB

I'm being generous because it seems likely that it'll be back in some fashion eventually. That last article shows a place with a lot of problems, but lack of energy isn't one of them.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 9:01 AM on September 25, 2010

Huh, I didn't realize Gamasutra had a Kindle version of its Postmortems book. All older games like Black & White, Unreal Tournament, etc.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:15 AM on September 25, 2010

I really wish every person in the software industry had to read a few of these. Always been my favorite part of Game Developer. (I work in software, but boring business stuff, not games)
posted by DigDoug at 9:31 AM on September 25, 2010

I really wish every person in the software industry had to read a few of these.

I wish everyone in every industry wrote these.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 10:20 AM on September 25, 2010

I don't know about "remarkably candid.". I've only read four, but they all seem pretty back-patting to me. Items in the "what went wrong" lists tend to be either problems that they suffered through for a while before eventually conquering, or all about corporate structure and not design (the APB blog series is pretty explicit about this). they read like ad copy. Am I missing any that are truly self-hard-hitting?
posted by painquale at 4:33 PM on September 25, 2010

It's so funny how representative the games are of their creators. I wonder if you excised some of the identifying details of the games from these post-mortems, could you match the authors to their games based on writing style? Because that Blueberry Garden post-mortem is like if the game was an essay. A little pretentious, still kind of whimsical, a lot of attention to detail, and still frustrating in its lack if in depth information (also, you can't save the f'n game, which if you rarely play computer games, like me, is the kiss of death -- I admit I only read half the review at first, but then just finished it now!)
posted by bluefly at 8:20 PM on September 25, 2010

I absolutely love Gamasutra's post-mortems, but I will agree that (especially in the case of indie games), they appear to be structured as an extension of the marketing materials.

However, this is probably a side effect of the postmortems being public -- I've worked in the games industry, and the internal post-mortems I read were extremely blunt on the 'what went wrongs.' That's kind of the point, really: You're writing the document so you don't those particular mistakes EVER AGAIN.

However, whenever you present something to The Internet, which never forgets and often takes things out of context, it's natural and sensible to put your best foot forward.

Occasionally, however, you can find a public post-mortem where the "what went wrongs" are so big that there's really no way to plausibly put a good face on it, other than to say 'we learned a lot and are so excited to make an awesome game this time.' I remember reading a post-mortem for Golden Axe: Beast Rider, which basically boiled down to 'we made some awesome riding mechanics and realized way too late we didn't have time to implement multiplayer, which screwed us since that was a core component of our franchise. But we learned a lot!'
posted by ®@ at 9:40 PM on September 25, 2010

Loved learning more about TWEWY. It's one of the best handheld games I've played and a great original IP from Square Enix.
posted by dragonplayer at 12:19 PM on September 26, 2010