O Making-of de Bioshock

A edição de Novembro da revista GameDeveloper traz um artigo dedicado ao desenvolvimento do jogo Bioshock (um dos maiores sucessos do ano).

Inicialmente apresentado em 2006, o jogo foi evoluindo através do feedback obtido através das várias demos:

Our first public presentation was at E3 2006. We had developed a great deal of content before that point, but hadn't yet built a space that really demonstrated the game experience to our satisfaction. The E3 demo forced us to focus the whole team on what the user experience should be. We defined a message for the demo - player choice - and built a narrative around that message. Even though the experience was highly scripted at the time, it effectively demonstrated the feel of the game we wanted. Another example of demo-inspired development was the "Hunting the Big Daddy" demo. Though Big Daddies and Little Sisters had been part of the game in some form since the beginning, initially the player could confront Little Sisters directly without necessarily needing to dispatch the Big Daddy that protected them. During the development of this demo, the team discovered that with some polish and tuning changes the act of dealing with a Big Daddy could be a truly epic battle in itself. This led to the realization that Big Daddy battles should be the key to player growth, essentially providing a roving boss battle that players could undertake at a time and place of their choosing."

Ao que se seguiu um teste final, para assegurar que tudo funcionava como era suposto:

"The first external BioShock focus test was meant to be a sanity check: to get a better sense of what was working well but needed polish and what wasn't working at all.

At this point we had already done one small round of internal focus testing with friends of friends, which had turned out mostly positive feedback. So, just after the first beta, the entire design team plus a contingent of 2K producers headed off to see how a group that knew nothing about our company or BioShock would react to the first level.

It was brutal.

The first level, they said, was overly dense, confusing, and not particularly engaging. Players would acquire new powers but not know how to use them, so they stuck to using more traditional weapons and became frustrated. They didn't interact with the Big Daddies, and they didn't understand (or care) how to modify their characters. They were so overwhelmed by dialogue and backstory that they missed key information. A few of the players did start to see the possible depth of the game, but even they were frustrated by the difficulty of actually using the systems we had created.

Based on this humbling feedback, we came to the realization that our own instincts were not serving us well. We were making a game that wasn't taking the initial user experience into account, and we weren't thinking enough about how to make it accessible to a wide variety of players.

After the focus test, we went back to the drawing board for the entire learning sequence of the game. We scrapped the gameplay in the first two levels entirely and re-architected them to be a much slower paced experience that walked the player through the more complicated gameplay verbs, such as "one-two punch"-combining weapons and plasmids.

We changed the medical pavilion from having sandbox-style gameplay to using a series of locks and keys that were set up to ensure that the player knew how to use at least a few key plasmids. And we made a development rule that future changes would be data-driven, not based solely on our own instincts."

Para quem estiver interessado em saber mais sobre o desenvolvimento dos jogos, e que se passa "por dentro", a GameDeveloper é uma referência obrigatória.

via [GamaSutra]