Guest Speakers

This week we got a visit by some very important people in the industry. The lead designer and creative director of the Deus Ex Human Revolution team came from Eidos Montreal and talked to us about what they went through throughout the pre production, production, and eventual shipping of the AAA title.

One thing that stuck with me was how they came with the systems and ideas for the game story line. I really enjoyed their description of how they wrote all of their ideas with sticky notes and and the bigger ideas on bigger paper on the walls until eventually the room told the story of Deus Ex. This is a much different approach than what we are experiencing in our senior team projects in which we use the agile system. In comparison the Deus Ex team approach was much more organic with the downside being that it took more time. The development process in the industry takes a lot of time as they have to think about every facet, every action that the player might or might not take. The speakers reinforced my notion that making a video game is not only hard but also a monumental undertaking which is why the industry is so competitive and why companies hire only the most talented people.

One of the things i was to hear about was how long the project was in the conceptual phase, nothing can really get done until the story, characters, and game mechanics are all fleshed out which took the Deus Ex team quite a while to achieve.

I really enjoyed the speakers' presentation i could tell they had rehearsed it before hand which i am not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing but i thought it was very successful. I think that the main things that i gathered from the presentation were the importance of pre production and how much that shapes a game, this applies to our capstone project because we are exploring many different ideas and we are taking our time to weigh each one and come out with the most viable and fun in the short time we have to develop it.