Tools Roundtable (Saturday)

• Make programmer use tool and watch tool user

Management

• Recommended: Fred Brooke's Keynote, or get the new edition of The Mythical Man Month, PeopleWare, etc.
• "Critical stage analysis" = post-mortem after every milestone, recommended
• Spiral process/model works well for game development
• Give the feedback from tool users to management.
• Provide references (Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra, Rapid Development) to less experienced managers

Design issues of engine and tools

• Proper factoring of graphics tools: want to share game engine and tools code; but may have different optimizations in each case
• Define the target hardware for shipped tools (someone's (iD's or Epic's?) new tools requires a 64-bit processor and tons of memory)
• Think of tools as a mini-game: a real project worthy of design, preproduction, QA, etc.
• Tool programmers as part of the team, especially for smaller studios
• Don't borrow tool programmers
• Art/programming/design Leads involved in intial tool design
• After the artist makes a script, then maintained by programmers (can use artist's version as a prototype if not well structured)
• Budget for tools!
• Three levels of game abstraction:
  • Stuff for every game (strings, memory management, etc.)
  • Stuff for every similar game (platform genre: tile-based maps)
  • Stuff for this game
  Tools tend to apply to the middle level: don't try and generalize beyond this
• First step: make a UI library => ensures a consistent look and feel. Then artists/users don't have to relearn as much every project.

Content creation loop

• Automatically back-propogate changes to source data (if info is in two places, it is wrong in one)
• On consoles, can have debug versions of program read level data (or lighting or whatever) off of the network; console can apply edits directly to remote file.
• Look at how RenderWare Studio gets instant response to art changes on a console.
• "Tech Artists" are valuable -- help you know which things are hard
• Peer support is good: try IGDA message forums. High End 3D has a Maya forum
• Look at www.kamron.net for info from talk on using excel to generate code, etc.
• Read IGDA whitepaper; "best practice" info good for making a business case for tools.
• Will setup a tools forum on IGDA; moderator's notes will appear there