Galactrix developer lays out candid insight

Mike Bantick
Friday, 27 February 2009 08:20

Opinion and Analysis

There were also issues with localisation – that is, producing the game in other languages.  In some release candidates, code error messages made their way into the game as scenario text. 

Fawkner was quite candid in his discussion about these problems, including the quote that ultimately the localised versions of the game where a “dogs breakfast’.  “But, “ says Fawkner “these were not the fault of the Galactrix team, but of upper management.  Small inefficiencies get magnified!”

Fawkner attributes this to growing pains, “Everything you did that was inefficient got bigger and bigger, and though it worked; we have been doing game localisations for years, but as the company grew, the inefficiencies could not be handled by the people looking after it”.

“We will hire a localisation manager this year” Fawkner said, along with other lessons learned as part of company growing.  “Originally I scoped these projects to have a staff of 28, 28 was the correct number, “ Fawkner mused, “  We ended up with 45, not because we were throwing people at late stuff, it was the difference in output of the senior people against the junior new staff.  Even a great junior does not have the output of a good senior, a gun senior will put out 16 times more output than a rank junior”.

The last dumb thing that Fawkner observed during the past development years of Infinite Interactive was having competing products in the market. 

“I believe it is important to work with different publishers” Fawkner states,” if you tie yourself in with one publisher, as a small developer, they start to control you” “but if you are going to do three games with three publishers that will compete for shelf space, they all want their game to come out first” “you get some pretty angry people on the publishing side, they can be pretty insistant.”

Fawkner reasoned with publishers in pointing out that working with three publishers enabled Infinite Interactive to be as effective as possible with each, without having to worry about the quite real issue of having a game cancelled.

Amongst the “smart stuff” that Fawkner is please about included the hiring of production staff.  This enabled the day to day operation of the studio to continue unabated during the projects, this allowed senior people to concentrate on what they do best.

Infinite Interactive remained design focused hiring folks with specific criteria that extolled the virtues of game-play over glitz or tech bias.  The basic guidelines that Fawkner was using during development, was that a game needed to be structurally sound before release.

Having said that, though Fawkner is understandably proud of Galactrix, and also relieved to finally do a Sci-fi themed gamer over the fantasy titles he has been part of for 25 years, he is once again candid in admitting there were parts he would love to do again.

“The story is not fleshed out as well as I would have liked” Says Fawkner, in particular referring to the early stages of the games fiction.  “We are not Blizzard, we are not PopCap, we don’t have [despite the companies name] infinite time to repolish.” He concluded.