In Gamasutra's latest feature, Turn 10 Studios (
Forza Motorsport 3) development manger Daniel Adent
looks at how the team sought to always have a working build during development, and how they achieved that goal.
"How many postmortems have we all read or participated in where good engineering and development practices were abandoned because of an aggressive schedule?" Adent asks at the outset of the piece.
While many argue that producers or publishers create pressure, Adent believes the engineering team also shares responsibility for these decisions. "It is often we, the software engineers, who will abandon or refuse to initiate these habits because we are so passionate about delivering the biggest and most feature-rich game possible," he writes.
With this in mind, Adent writes that he was determined to make sure development of
Forza Motorsport 3 followed some important practices.
For example, the team decided the game must be in a playable form -- from a DVD, no less -- at all times while under development. "It is amazing how design, art and technology iteration is enabled when there is no question that the game is going to be playable each day and that all content in the game is usable," Ardent writes.
"This also has significant positive impact on the quality of work estimates when the game is fully playable and can be used while developing the estimates for work as well as implementing the features," he added.
To find out more about the team's development goals and how their implementation profoundly affected the process of developing
Forza Motorsport 3, check out Gamasutra's latest feature,
Forza Motorsport 3 And Predictable Development.
