32 / wfmag.cc
Shane McCafferty at ten
years old, doing solo game
development from home on
his Spectrum +3 in 1986.
Distributed game development: the future?Toolbox
Forget about games made under one roof: it’s now
possible for teams to work remotely, Kieran writeshe games industry is still
comparatively young. Looking at
how development has changed
over the last 30 years or so, we’ve
constantly changed the techniques
and approaches we take, whether we’re
looking for a competitive advantage over rival
developers, or hoping to create a unique hook in
our games.
One thing that has changed massively is the
number of people that collaborate to make
a game. In the industry’s early years, gamesDistributed game
development:
the future?
T
were commonly made by individuals who wrote
the code, created the graphics, sound, and
everything else themselves. Then people started
working in small teams, breaking down the work
between different disciplines. As time marched
on and the scope of games expanded, so did
the teams. We started making games with tens
of people, then hundreds. Now, in some cases,
over a thousand people can be involved in the
development of a single triple-A title.
While development teams have expanded,
in most cases, those teams operate under a
single roof. The reason for this is simple: ease
of communication. In any creative industry,
one of the hardest things to maintain as
team sizes increase is communication, and in
industries where the work of one person can
impact a large percentage of the rest of the
workforce, this can be difficult to manage just
to ensure that people can do their work rather
than spending most of their time sending and
reading emails and sitting in endless meetings.
Project managers are unsung heroes in this
regard, because it’s their job to ensure that
communication happens in a way that means
games actually get made.
In some cases, games are made
collaboratively between two or more studios,AUTHOR
KIERAN D’ARCHAMBAUD
Kieran has held positions including lead programmer and technical
director for studios including Rare and Evolution. He now contracts
remotely for clients such as Ultimatum Games. koding.co.uk