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Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 2:05 pm
by MaffRignall
Famous Mortimer wrote:Could you imagine one of those being done today? How dull would they be?
7th October

Clocked into work at 9 A.M. Today they had me working on the textures which will eventually rendered onto the enemy soldier's pants. I also cleaned up some grass textures. I seems the project is still on schedule. Write more tomorrow.



As others have said, it wouldn't really be feasible now, because modern development teams comprise dozens of people. The whole point of a 'Diary' is that it's the personal view of something, but today a single person would only be working on a small part of a project.

Back then, one person could negotiate a contract with a games publishing company, then write the game themselves in their own time. That seems almost ridiculous when you look at what the industry's become now.

For me, the reason those diaries worked so well is because they perfectly captured the small, informal, underground-ish nature of games development at the time.

Anyway, the Paradroid diary was my favourite, followed by the Citadel one. The part in the Paradroid one where Braybrook caves in to user feedback and rips the crosshair aiming system out of the game, after months of trying to make it work... that should be required reading for anyone working in the games industry today.

And Martin Walker's was great, as other people have said, because he really lets you into his world. It was a bit sad to see it end, almost like your favourite TV show being cancelled. I saw an article by him in a recent issue of Sound On Sound, and immediately thought of his nylon socks :-).

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 8:29 pm
by andy vaisey
MaffRignall wrote:The part in the Paradroid one where Braybrook caves in to user feedback and rips the crosshair aiming system out of the game, after months of trying to make it work... that should be required reading for anyone working in the games industry today.
So true!

On the other hand, as you pointed out, in today's development teams it would probably take one person to draw the crosshairs, one person to implement them in code, one person to debug the code, one person to playtest, then bugger listening to user feedback and just do it the publisher's way after all... :evil: