GDC 2008 : N+ Postmortem

N+ is a game that game out on XBox Live Arcade this weekend. The orginal game, N, was developed by Metanet Software. Slick Entertainment took this game and ported it to XBLA. One of the cofounders of Slick is Nick Waanders. Nick is another one of the guys that I worked with back in the day at Relic Entertainment.

The session started with a number of production and business issues that the project had to deal with. The project had a budget of about $220,000. This money was raised through savings, grants, and loans. A big chunk of the funding came from Telefilm.

The rest of the session was a month-by-month breakdown of the major tasks that were required to complete the game.

The production schedule started in February of 2007. Nick started by implementing a prototype of the game in C#. The main goal was to figure out how exactly the controller would work and get a general feel of the gameplay. This prototype was later ported to C++. The Eets codebase was used as a starting point.

If you’ve worked at Relic then you’ve probably used the amazing Profiler Tool that Nick wrote. I’ve heard that this tool is now being used across multiple THQ studios. Nick is a huge believer in creating absolutely kick ass tools that smooth out development. For N+, a Character Editor, Level Editor, UI Editor, Localization Tool, and Debug Tool were created. These tools were all written in C#. This is a lot of tools for an independent studio to be creating. However, Nick feels that this definitely shortened the length of development. This was especially true of the Debug Tool.

What Went Right

- Design was set very early in production
- The homebuilt tools helped a lot
- Focus Testing at PAX improved the game
- Hit all milestones except for the last certification milestone

What To Improve

- Don’t fail certification
- The game contained way too many features and options. As a result there was a lot of extra bugs
- They would add an extra programmer at bug fixing time to help ship the game