The decision to rush the game’s development seems ludicrous in retrospect, but Allen Adham, the company’s president, was under pressure to grow revenue. Q2 1998 – actual ship date for StarCraft.Q4 1996 – planned ship date for StarCraft.The team members were regrouped to build something that could reach market quickly so Blizzard wouldn’t have a long gap between game launches. The project leadership was comprised of the same folks who had started Shattered Nations (video), a turn-based strategy game along the lines of X-COM that Blizzard announced in May 1995 but canceled some months later. StarCraft was originally envisioned as a game with modest goals that could fit into a one-year development cycle so that it could be released for Christmas, 1996. While its predecessors (Warcraft I and II) were far more reliable games than their industry peers, StarCraft crashed frequently enough that play-testing was difficult right up until release, and the game continued to require ongoing patching efforts post-launch. Part 3: Explaining the implementation details of the fixĭuring the development of StarCraft, a two and a half year slog with over a year of crunch time prior to launch, the game was as buggy as a termite nest.Part 2: How we could have fixed the most common causes.This post: Why StarCraft crashed frequently during development.I’ll be posting the latter parts over the next several days. I’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |