getting it right the first time
in the early stages of game development, it’s tempting to just cram stuff in to see if it works, under the banner of “proof of concept”, without regard for laying a solid foundation and all that. hell, it’s tempting to do that in the late stages of development, under the banner of “holy shit this has to go in, i don’t care how it gets done”. a certain amount of that is fine early on, even necessary. but if you’re still doing that late enough in the game that you can no longer say with a straight face, “sure, we’ll back this out and do it right, just as soon as we’re over the hump”, well then god have mercy on your soul.
having seen more than my share of this firsthand, i’ve been taking great pains to think things all the way through – overthink them, really – before not so much leaping into action, but gingerly taking the first baby step. hence all the brain-wracking and soul-searching about something so simple as one little facet of voiceover integration. because i’ve been there when, months before launch, you suddenly find out that the content team has been triggering some unknown percentage of your 3D dialog as 2D zone-wide sounds, or the 2D dialog that was crafted for a very specific use in one area is now being spammed mercilessly in another area, because somebody thought it made a “cool sound effect”.
so my apologies to the guy here who innocently asked me a few weeks ago to put a few lines of VO in the game. that inquiry set off the avalanche of design decisions – that had to be made at some point – which has kept me from fulfilling what seemed like such a simple request. it was like, “well, i could just shoehorn this in, but if i was to do this right i’d have to make sure Thingy Z was in place…which means Thingy Y must also be set up…and hey, without Thingy X it won’t function correctly…but for that to work i have to have thingy W ready to go…”. you see where that’s going. i’m almost back to Thingy A now, which means i can finally get around to dropping in a couple lines of test dialog, fer cryin’ out loud. it also means i’m ready to drop in 50,000 lines of permanent dialog, if need be. and that kind of up-front investment will help me sleep at night during the pre-launch crunch.
