Game Developer's February Issue Showcases Minecraft, Shank Postmortems

Author: by Staff

The GDC-distributed February 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers, and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats. The exclusive cover story to this issue, which will be available in all GDC 2011 conference attendees' welcome bags, focuses on Mojang's development of the smash hit Minecraft. The game is an indie dream: self-funded, largely the result of one person's vision, and an immediate, runaway success. Behind the scenes, however, Minecraft struggled to stay ahead of ever increasing user demands and the studio's explosive growth from a one-man hobby to an ongoing business. As part of the in-depth postmortem, Markus Persson describes the dangers of code rewrites: "After many months of working on the same code base, I was growing frustrated with it and decided to start over on a new engine mostly written from scratch. I guess this happens to most programmers. You get frustrated with some structure you put in place early on, or you think of a feature you don’t think you can work into the current code base, and you decide to do a rewrite. This is almost never a good idea. Not only do you waste time duplicating work, but you end up with fewer features, because you either forget to add them or just never get around to them." A second postmortem deals with Shank, Klei Entertainment's visceral downloadable action title which was birthed when the company lost its publisher support on a free-to-play online game, close to its completion. As the studio was abruptly forced back to the drawing board, studio founder Jamie Cheng describes how the setback granted the team a newfound sense of freedom, which in turn led to the creation of Shank. "Without impending milestone deliverables, it’s okay to have months at a time where nothing seems to be getting done while the tools and engine are being created. While the back-end engine was being built, we also lovingly created three essential tools for content creators: - The Shanker—our level creation tool, to allow level designers and level artists to create levels and script the experience. - A custom animation pipeline from Adobe Flash to allow artists to work naturally in Flash while still pushing the boundaries of what can be rendered on screen. - A stategraph engine for game object behavior, to allow designers to create enemy behaviors, interactive objects, and Shank controls. In the end, we built 13 levels in three months using these tools and the fact that our programming team worked a total of possibly three overtime weekends throughout the entire project is a testament to how robust our tools are." Each month, game creators put their work on the dissecting table so that Game Developer readers can learn what went right and what went wrong during a given project. In another signature feature, 'Dissecting The Postmortem', Ara Shirinian looks at the big picture and collects data from past postmortems to identify the common issues affecting the game development process. Also in this issue, Google's Chris Pruett examines the 'Two-Factor Theory of Emotion', which describes how emotional states can be modulated by physiological changes. Stressful situations increase engagement and can give rise to often contradictory emotions. It's an idea that has wide implications for game design and goes against the conventional wisdom regarding easy difficulty in games. In addition, the February issue features our regular columnists and special guests including Geoff Evans, David Edery, Mathew Kumar, Steve Theodore, Damion Schubert, Scott Lawlor, and Matthew Wasteland -- who contribute detailed and important pieces on various areas of game development. Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of February 2011’s magazine as a single issue.