Biggest improvements from UE
- Thread starter Starkey
- Start date
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Well now, that's a pretty difficult question to answer, especially halfway through development.
Biggest differences that will be visible to the players: UE was very rough around the edges. Pilots called you Casey, the new ships were a jumble of models from all over the place, each with a different style and quality level, and a lot of other small things were limited by our ability to mod WCP. Standoff is much more polished in this regard - all the ships are Eder-class quality, with stylistically-matched textures; our pilots, while not all are recorded from scratch, are all adapted to Standoff, so they won't call you Casey, Lieutenant, or even Colonel Blair
. Similarly, mission design is (IMHO) much more organic - in UE, we operated in a kind of "we want eight missions, let's see what we can put in there" manner, while here we're more concerned with making the missions all fit together into a coherent campaign than in having a specific number of missions (example: the Prologue was originally supposed to have 5 missions; it now has 6 or 7 missions, depending on the player's actions). And, of course, Standoff is bigger in general (which will be the death of us yet 
).
Biggest differences invisible to the players: less improvisation, to a certain degree. Ok, we still do make large changes in the game design in the middle of development, but not on the UE "whoa, we can do FMV now? Let's get some FMV then!" scale. The changes we make in Standoff are limited to the later (still undeveloped) parts of the game, and stem from the fact that we haven't fully planned out those parts of the game; those parts that are already done generally don't see (too many) significant changes. However, the differences in these aspects of UE and Standoff are not as significant as I hoped they would be - the biggest lesson I've learned from Standoff is that we still have a lot to learn. We're only now gradually getting to that sort of level of organisation that you might see in professional game developers - until now, we've been firmly on the fan-project level of organisation, and that's pretty lousy.
Biggest differences that will be visible to the players: UE was very rough around the edges. Pilots called you Casey, the new ships were a jumble of models from all over the place, each with a different style and quality level, and a lot of other small things were limited by our ability to mod WCP. Standoff is much more polished in this regard - all the ships are Eder-class quality, with stylistically-matched textures; our pilots, while not all are recorded from scratch, are all adapted to Standoff, so they won't call you Casey, Lieutenant, or even Colonel Blair
. Similarly, mission design is (IMHO) much more organic - in UE, we operated in a kind of "we want eight missions, let's see what we can put in there" manner, while here we're more concerned with making the missions all fit together into a coherent campaign than in having a specific number of missions (example: the Prologue was originally supposed to have 5 missions; it now has 6 or 7 missions, depending on the player's actions). And, of course, Standoff is bigger in general (which will be the death of us yet ).Biggest differences invisible to the players: less improvisation, to a certain degree. Ok, we still do make large changes in the game design in the middle of development, but not on the UE "whoa, we can do FMV now? Let's get some FMV then!" scale. The changes we make in Standoff are limited to the later (still undeveloped) parts of the game, and stem from the fact that we haven't fully planned out those parts of the game; those parts that are already done generally don't see (too many) significant changes. However, the differences in these aspects of UE and Standoff are not as significant as I hoped they would be - the biggest lesson I've learned from Standoff is that we still have a lot to learn. We're only now gradually getting to that sort of level of organisation that you might see in professional game developers - until now, we've been firmly on the fan-project level of organisation, and that's pretty lousy
.
overmortal
Bearded Person
Well, a non-paid staff is also something of a set-back, because you can't threaten someone's paycheck for their lack of productivity
powell99
Aviation Junkie
Eder said:Amen to that. Specially the last bit.
You seem to be doing real well. Standoff is the mod my freinds and I are all waiting for. Other than Saga.