Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 08 December 2009 07:55
Opinion and Analysis
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The general feel of the Game Connect Asia Pacific 2009 conference is one of guarded optimising for the future. The final day has kicked off with a frank discussion from Transmission Games former senior producer Justin Halliday. Halliday spoke about the chequered development process for the award winning WWII flyer game Heroes Over Europe.
Transmission Games is no more, a victim of trying to fly through a dangerous storm laden economic sky.
One of the last products to emerge from the Melbourne based studio was Heroes Over Europe, an arcade WWII themed flying game with a pedigree of former games such as Heroes Over The Pacific to build upon.
As the last day of Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) kicks off, senior producer Justin Halliday spoke of the tribulations during the 44 months of the games development. It as a story of high ambition, improper technical decisions, staff turnover, bad timing and basic bad luck, though the resultant game was pretty good.
Halliday set the scene with conference delegates; it was clear from the beginning that Heroes Over Europe (HOE) was going to struggle. Halliday spoke of Blue-Sky ambition, a game making the jump to next-generation platform needed to have more of everything, more planes, more missions, larger textures and shinier graphics.
But the scope far out-weighed the allocated budget, which was little more than that given to the previous generation title Heroes Over The Pacific (HOTP). The team also made an early decision to throw away much of the work they had done on HOTP to start from scratch. This meant throwing out the AI, art assets and so on, things that subsequently took two years to recreate.
Timing issues caused the early abandonment of engine and art tools with the laborious task of rebuilding these over the development course. This decision was exacerbated by an overarching situation that Transmission Games found itself in at the time. Red Mile Entertainment were discussing a buy-out bid with the developer, as an Australian subsidiary of the company, this meant the development team could through a little caution to the wind as far as the games budget was concerned.
However, after some 21 months development (just one month shy of the total development for HOTP) HOE was still only in a rudimentary stage. HOE needed to be re-scoped, this occurred in September 2007 with the mission numbers cut by a whopping 40 percent (From 26 down to 10). Multiplayer was removed completely and a decision was made to introduce a PC version (or SKU) of the game to increase potential revenue.
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