Why Presentation Is Important
I was in a discusion with coworkers recently about milestones, and about relative importance of tasks. Some opinions were voiced that certain tasks that were "just for show" were less important than the most critical ones needed to get the game done. I was reminded of a story I'd hear, which I'll share here.

The story is nearly a decade old, but the truth is timeless. Courtesy of Brand Gamblin, who was a junior coder on the project.

The game was Microprose's "European Air War," the sequel to their hit flight sim (remember when the words "hit" and "flight sim" actually went together?) "1942 - Pacific Air War." The game was enormously over budget and schedule, and nowhere near ready to ship, with embarassing bugs that just would not die. According to Gamblin, "If you fired your wing guns, the wings would fall off. It was not possible to take off or land, and if you touched the ground, you would be bounced miles up into space. Planes occasionally flew backward, and the AI would periodically (and unexplainably) shoot down its own teammates."

Every week, the studio execs were meeting with hard questions, and weren't liking the answers. It became clear that th project's days were numbered. Several team members, seeing the writing on the wall, jumped ship. By several, I mean, "The entire programming team."

Well, the execs for some reason decided not to axe the project then and there. Maybe they believed (rightfully, in retrospect) that there was a chance of salvaging the investment they'd already made in the game. So they hired a new programming team, and a new lead programmer (who Gamblin calls, "Tom.")

The new lead, realizing what dire straits the game was in, spent a whole bunch of time not fixing the bugs or doing what he could to fight the innumerable fires surrounding the game. Instead he implemented a really cool cinematic camera object. The "Cool Cam" would jump to wherever the most exciting action was in the game. All it did was show off what *was* working in the game.

The other team members were befuddled. Gamblin reports, "The cool cam was cool, yes, but I had to bite my lip to keep from saying, `That doesn't help us! We've got real issues, and you're screwing around with the camera!'"

Turns out, the new lead programmer knew exactly what he was doing. As Gamblin explains:

"Then I went to one of the meetings with the execs. It was another one of those, `Give us one good reason why we shouldn't can your project' meetings. Tom started up the game, and started flying around, trying to avoid the obvious issues (like shooting your own wings off, or the planes flying backward).

"One of the execs threw out a tough question, designed to show how far over budget we were. Tom put down the joystick, and hit the `cool cam' button. Then he turned around to answer the question. While he was answering the question, every eye in the room was on the screen as one amazing scene showed after another. I looked at the execs, and I swear, some of them were gaping. No one was listening to Tom as he answered the question, and when he finished, he picked up the joystick, and jumped back into the game. Every time they asked a question, he would switch to cool cam, and they would completely forget why they had asked.

"I swear, that camera saved the project."

(Check out the whole story HERE.)

And it worked. I don't know if the sales numbers ever made EAW worth the money invested in it, but was a very popular flight sim when released, won critical acclaim, and is still being enjoyed by die-hard fans today.

The moral of the story is something that marketing guys understand implicitly, but we engineering types often overlook as we desperately try to dig through tons of details:

Oftentimes presentation is every bit as important as the actual product itself.

After all, no matter what product you are making, it's ultimately for the benefit of people. So it makes sense that no matter what is actually going on under the hood, part of the function of your product is to make the right people (your users, customers, players, clients, management, whomever) happy, give them warm fuzzies. What exactly that entails is dependent on the audience.

In the case of European Air War, what management wanted was a very cool game to sell that customers would love. What the lead programmer did was present it to them so that they could see, clearly, that this was exactly what they had on their hands already. They, too, were having trouble digging through all those details and seeing the big picture.

And while I don't play it anymore, as a customer and fan of European Air War, I want to thank that lead programmer for realizing the importance of presentation. Oh, and I had fun watching the Cool Cam, too!


(Vaguely) related bits of poorly-presented fluff:
* Polish: Attention To Detail
* The Red-Line In Game Demos
* Red-Line Analysis of Mainstream Games
* Quality Ain't Easy

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Labels: Flight Sims, Game Design, Mainstream Games, productivity, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:34 AM (Permalink)