The office has been in the grip of a Starcraft obsession for the last couple of months. It’s undoubtedly a very good game. The balancing is exquisite and the plot and ambience are excellent. There’s no doubt that it’s the RTS genre at its very best and yet I can’t help but feel that I’m still playing the same game I’ve been playing for the last seven years. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Dune II and Command and Conquer, but I’m pretty sure I’ve squeezed every ounce of enjoyment from the genre that I possibly can.

Every developer under the sun will tell you that his game is ‘revolutionary’. Egged on by marketing people they’ll encourage you with clichés such as ‘genre-defining’, ‘immersive’ and ‘compelling’. But how many of them are actually doing anything fresh and original? In 1998 over thirty Command and Conquer Clones were released. And then there are also huge numbers of sequels being churned out. I recently took a look at a major PC magazine’s list of 100 top games for 1999. Roughly 75% of them were sequels or derivatives. It’s a rather sad state of affairs.

Has the games industry may have become a victim of its own success? These days a game takes two years to make and costs over a million pounds, which is a lot of money. You can understand why publishers are unwilling to invest that kind of money into a new concept. Yet without innovation the industry will surely grow stale.

For me personally, two years of working on a pale facsimile of someone else’s work would be a fate worse than death itself. When we show our game for the first time we hope that if nothing else, people will think it’s an original concept. Of course everyone says this sort of stuff and I’d expect you to greet much of the above with a healthy degree of cynicism. We’re hoping that you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The period from September up until Christmas has been a relatively tough one. Having agreed commercial terms with Eidos in September, we had to wait until December before actually agreeing on the deal. It’s been pretty tedious and most of my days were taken up with debating legal minutiae with Eidos’ lawyers. If I wasn’t doing that, I was poring over a hundred-page contract. Had it not been as important as it was, I would gladly have rolled over and thrown up my hands in surrender. But I simply couldn’t do that. You see the actual commercial terms (i.e. money and royalties) were agreed early on. It’s the other eighty pages that were the problem. Lurking beneath the impenetrable legal jargon lay all manner of booby-traps that could have caused us problems at some point down the line. Had we not had initial funding there’s no doubt in my mind that we would have been forced to sign a deal that would have come back to haunt us. There was nothing underhand in all this. Eidos were simply trying to negotiate the deal that was best for them, as I was for us. It was a major weight off my mind when the deal was finally signed, just in time for Christmas.

Much of my coding and designing had to be done by night as a result. I don’t mind this at all though as there are always people about and there’s an excellent sense of camaraderie. Because we’re a small team we have a very flat structure and everyone gets involved in the design of the game. We aimed to have a very basic, playable version of the game up and running as soon as possible. The usual plan is to code by day and then playtest at night. The next day we talk about what worked and what didn’t. We then tear things out and put other things in. I don’t think there’s a magic formula to getting great gameplay, you’ve simply got to play the game for thousands of hours before you can be sure that it’s both fun and balanced.

Obviously this takes a lot of commitment from everyone. People spend a lot of time here and I’d like to think it’s because they’re enjoying what they’re doing. There are down sides to this dedication though. I’ve recently introduced the concept of an office fruit bowl in an attempt to stave off an impending scurvy epidemic. These people clearly take their jobs very seriously, so much so that they’ve taken the developer lifestyle to heart. I suppose you could call this Developer Chic. Clothes with holes in are de rigeur. Black is, well, the black of the nineties. Oh, and an atrocious diet is a must. Richard, one of our programmers, is a developer’s developer. He keeps a loaf of bread on his desk and appears to live on a diet of Nutella and Sandwich Spread sandwiches which he assures me is the cornerstone of every nutritious breakfast. Another favourite is scrambled egg on toast, drenched in vinegar, with a dash of salad cream, finished with a layer of tomato ketchup. If nothing else, I give him ten out ten for originality.

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