In one of today's main Gamasutra features, we document proceedings last week at GDC Europe, as Bizarre Creations' Chris Pickford and Gareth Wilson gave a 'postmortem' of the still-being-completed
Project Gotham Racing 3 for the Xbox 360, and the talk gave a fascinating early look at developing launch window content for a next-generation console.
Kieron Gillen's write-up of the session explains a plethora of practical tips, including both notable pitfalls and innovative concepts from the team:
"In terms of process, Bizarre made a mistake of not nailing down their essentials early enough, such as memory management or vision checking. Later, they needed to rewrite the whole thing, which led to two weeks where no artist could genuinely see if their material worked in-game.
On the more successful side, they had two game versions constantly available, selectable from the boot screen. Either a fast or a pretty version. The pretty version has all the graphic modes on, existing for screenshots and to remind people what it'll look like after optimization. The fast version can actually be played properly, though often with grey-untextured cars.
Both aspects of the game will be brought together for final release, but you'll never have them both simultaneously prior to that when making a next-gen game. They also kept a safe-build available which while not be the latest code, was relatively stable and could be showed to any journalist who turn up unannounced. The fiends."
You can now
read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).
