There’s an interesting article on Blizzard development strategy on gamasutra. They use a process of endless iteration & playtesting to get their games just right. Sometimes they throw in features, let them percolate for a few months, see what they like and what they don’t, and keep only what fits the picture.

There is a striking resemblence with what we are doing for Off Limits. It’s the true “when it’s done” game development mentality, that has been all but lost in the now adolescent game industry. Development time is no constraint to us, we’d rather get the details right, and make a game that we are proud of, where each piece has earned its role in the game, or has been discarded in the playtesting process. A part from a utopian perfect design, it is the only way to have a game that is feature-rich, true to the core game idea, and consistent end-to-end.

It’s also funny to read the comments on the article. Most commenters point out that this mentality is a luxury that only Blizzard and a few other big players can afford, since they have a lot of capital backing them and are relatively free of investor pressure. I’d like to make the point that they are but one kind of developers that can develop this way. You do not need to have millions and millions of dollars to spare to free yourself from the industrial constraints of game development. Simply developing your project outside of the industry suffices. If you do go commercial, and are in the phase where a single project becomes your company’s single point of failure, you give up the right to the “when it’s done” mentality.

We’re not there yet though. This alternative model is only available to the passionates among us. It is near impossible to attract a group of hobbyists large enough to develop a serious, polished game in a timeframe that does not outdate the game on its release. I have high hopes for the near future here, where more and more techniques will become available to build scalable assets, and where the graphical improvement of games will cease to be the core focus of developers and the core desire of gamers. As for Off Limits, we hope to have made a game that is fun and timeless enough and with a visual style sufficiently detailed and coherent to compensate for our lack of next-gen textures or production-quality animations. If the fun we had in developing and have in playtesting it are any measure, we should be OK :)