Live it. Learn it. Love it.

That is all. Really looking forward to more people checking this out.

In a typical software engineering life cycle, the developer works with a customer to create a final product through five distinct phases of development (requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment). Now, the order in which those are handled may vary on your life cycle model, but the basics of those five phases are always required. In the game industry, this is a tad twisted. We don’t technically have customers who contract our work and tell us what to do. We have a flourishing community full of rabid fans chomping at the bit to tell us how unbalanced one class is over another or how open RvR needs to have more incentive. Certainly, all are valid points and many drive our development direction; however, that isn’t our “customer” in the traditional sense of the word. The designer is.

Designers come up with all of those fancy ideas for making a game awesome. They deliver these ideas to engineers for implementation or even just basic feedback on technical feasibility, because let’s face it, sometimes designers come up with some crazy stuff. “No, we can’t have real-time FPS combat in a MMO with 2,000 people in the same region,” is one of my favorite quips. Even if your designers present to you a design dripping with insanity, it’s still the engineer’s job to make that designer happy. Happy designers means you’re doing a good job, because being a stubborn, arrogant, socially inept engineer isn’t going to get additional subscribers or make a great game.

Developing a game is much more different than developing a traditional desktop application (been there, done that… not fun). With game development, you have to bond with it. You have to be passionate about games in order to enjoy the job, and you must be a gamer. Otherwise, how are you to know how to best implement the system that will provide designers with all the widgets they need to accomplish what they asked for and more?

I say “more” because that is precisely what game engineers should strive for when designing the architecture for a new game system or feature. Take the designer’s ideas, and then add to it. Give them additional tools, resources, and functionality that will make them say “OH WOW” and make their system badass. Don’t do the minimum amount of work to get the job done. Dive in and get your hands dirty. Make the game better by giving the designers what they need to be happy. More importantly, think like a player. Look over the design and think “what could I add that would make this more fun?” then add functionality that designers may choose to take advantage of to script awesome game content.

For example, much of the work I’m doing for Warhammer’s first live expansion is based upon a very simple design. However, after looking at it from the player’s perspective, I found myself saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…” (to steal a phrase from Mark Davis’ book). Those “ifs” are what starts the brain churning on neat ideas and new functionality that you can provide your designers. I’ve also worked very hard to provide updated documentation on how to use the system and what new functionality I’ve provided them with outside of the design, citing specific examples of how to use it. The additional functionality is going to increase the immersive behavior of the live expansion.

Now, I’m not suggesting that game engineers go rogue, certainly not. However, I strongly advise them to work directly with designers and form good working relations with them. The classic cat and mouse struggle shouldn’t apply to game development. Designers and engineers shouldn’t be fighting each other over how systems are created. It should be a solid relationship full of collaboration that will help deliver a working, fun product.

Today I encountered a rare kind of elitist jerk, the Scenario Elitist, in my Warhammer adventures. I am just level 21, and was happily bouncing around tier 3 doing quests today when I decided to queue. The queues were firing like mad even for 1 in the afternoon. I was having quite a bit of fun until Mr. Elitist came around to hound me in tells about why I was queuing for T3 scenarios. The perception is that a level 21 is not effective against many of the enemies in a scenario, especially if they’re greater than level 26.

I beg to differ.

In fact, I believe I am quite effective. I may not PWNZOR and slap out wicked damage, but I provide the enemy with a distraction while the real threat goes for the scenario goal (murderball, flag, etc.). I am an annoyance. I prowl and screw with their healers. I rush in so the rabid dogs (a.k.a. the enemy) target me in a frenzy to gain leet renown points. I stay back and watch the healers, because who in their right mind would come up to kill a healer alone with another player near him?

I may not do 100k damage in a single scenario, Mr. Elitist, but I certainly give the rest of the team the upperhand in the battle as opposed to being what you so impolitely called “useless.”

Srsly!!#~

The Warhammer NDA has been lifted. Unleash the hounds of… well, WAR. While I certainly don’t have the time to post much of anything given my extremely busy life at home with the baby for the next few months, I will say this much:

I worked on the game for 3 years.
I saw it every day.
I spent many many late nights and weekends working at the office staring at said game…

I STILL would come home to play the beta.
I STILL play now with my daughter sleeping on my lap.

Hells yeah… bring it on. I can’t wait for this to launch so I can kill all of the innocent newbies ^_^;

Waaaaaaaaaaaagh and stuff… the Guild Standards feature has finally been revealed in greater detail by Jeff on the Warhammer Online website at the following podcast: http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/herald/flash/2008-06_standards.html.

I’ve been super busy working on the system for the past couple of months as it’s gone through iterations, design adjustments, and play-testing. I’m looking forward to seeing how the guild beta fairs with the feature. I’m also quite nervous, because it’ll be the first time many of my systems will come under major stress testing. I’ve been working on guild code for over a year now. There’s so many innovative and exciting features that are a part of it that I’m both excited and scared to have more people see it and play with it. There’s a lot of hard work that’s gone into it not only from me, but from my teammates as well. We’ve worked our butts off on it.

I am one of those fluffy social bunnies that feels that an MMO can’t thrive without a community and good social tools. There are so many MMOs that come out with only the most basic guild functions. It’s sad really. How can a community thrive if you don’t give the players the tools they need to socialize? I’m sorry, but servers need drama and a way to air out that drama. Forums (like Palo.net) are one thing, but an in-game mechanism for guild rivalries, grouping tools, etc. makes it so much simpler. Players shouldn’t have to go out of the game to get a hold of all of those tools! Bah. I’m probably preaching to the choir here (or to myself, since I don’t update often enough to have regular readers anymore).

Most of my time has been occupied with the family blog as opposed to my work-related/gaming blog. Sorry for that. Work’s been busy as has my home life and school life. I don’t seem to have a lot of time for much else these days! My daughter’s growing pretty well, so things have calmed down on that front. I’m looking forward to seeing her in late-July!

Work’s awesome. I’m working on a lot of really good community features right now that will be totally sweet once they’re done. I just wrapped up a lot of work on the Guild Standards system, which Josh talks about in the April newsletter. That feature was challenging work, but worthwhile if you ask me. I think it gave me a lot of experience in areas that I didn’t really have before. It also gave me a chance to break out of the typical programmer role and take a more software engineering role (yes, there is actually a difference…). Go me! Let’s me use that edumucation thingy that I’m paying nearly $30,000 for. It’ll be a very solid system that will give some good RVR perks.

I leave you tonight with my waaagh baby, who is now 7.5 months along and going strong!

Sigh… I guess it’s going to happen the closer Warhammer gets to release, so because I’ve seen so many stupidand uneducated posts to what I used to consider reputable game news sites, I have to post the obligatory link to Penny Arcade’s fantastic comic… it kind of just explains how I feel right now, without me actually saying it:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10

Last time I checked, I was still beta testing my butt off whenever I have time away from school and baby stuff. I also tend to work a lot to make sure this game has some great features. Sometimes, it’s just easier to shoot stupid people so they don’t breed.

Without sound too attention whore-y, I do have some ever so slightly good news to post about now. It’s the primary reason I haven’t been able to post too much, because to be quite frank, I’ve been super tired and unable to do much of anything but work and sleep. Anyway:

I’m pregnant.

There. It is that simple Maurice and I are really excited, and we’re looking forward to many months of strange cravings, backaches, and weight gain. We’re roughly 16 weeks along now and due toward the end of July (so no worries, AFTER Warhammer launches!!!).

We have a family site up and running, where we’re posting most of our baby updates so as to not clog our game/work/banter blogs with talk of diapers and ultrasounds: http://family.travin.com/

And who says EverQuest didn’t have a good thing going when all you did was kill Giant Rats outside of Qeynos as a newbie human?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/17/giant.rat.ap/index.html

That’s hot.

This semester I am taking two courses. One is on the design and implementation phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and the other is on verification and validation (aka “quality assurance”). My design and implementation course required me to write a rather long research paper. At first I was really concerned about what I would write, but I pushed for a gaming topic with the professor, and he allowed me to do it. I was really shocked honestly, because my previous courses had professors that believed the game industry was immature and not to be taken seriously by “real” software engineers.

My paper focuses on how to improve the scalability of online game systems. It happens to discuss quite a bit of what I have worked on in the past through Mythic and why online games need to be scalable and maintainable. In short, this is one paper I can post and know the gaming audience here will probably get a kick out of reading. Mind you, it is still a graduate research paper, so I tend to use technical text instead of flowery statements. I did try to make it entertaining though!

Feel free to read the paper in PDF format here:

http://www.fiercekitten.com/blog/papers/GNelson_SWEN646_ResearchPaper.pdf