05-29-2009, 01:52 PM
Snowreap Wrote:so engineering considerations always need to be taken into consideration, because they might veto your design.
all that is a given, and I assume everyone here was already aware of it. the reason for my post then, is to pose this question: how do you want to address it? as a part of each design item, or as a separate "Game Engineering" category, distinct from "Game Design"?
-ken
Very good points. We're a little bit lucky here since very little of what we've discussed so far requires any advances in new technology beyond what's already been achieved in other games. We're basically building the 24th word processor. We know certain things like spell check, copy-paste etc can work. Most of our design choices do not go beyond those bounds. Some certainly might, for example having massive numbers of people in one place pushes the limits of even the latest games. That, I'm afraid will always be with us in some form (once we can handle 500 people in one spot of our game world, we'll want to handle 5000, 10,000, 1 million). Also, if our Orcs are free to wonder the entire game world, that might introduce some challenges, but I think most of us are aware of that.
We're also lucky in the fact that many of us are software developers who have been involved in lots of different size projects. While we are certainly not getting awards here for following good project practices (market analysis, kick off, req analysis, requirements, design, implementation, iteration, maintenance etc) most of us are familiar with project life cycle, and more importantly, iterative development which is probably the only way to do a project like this with a bunch of crazy people throwing it together.
Back to your question, I would tie feasibility to each item as opposed to having a system wide category for it. That's just my 2 cents.
PS Remember that this section has "Theory" in the title so technically we don't need to worry about reality or ever building this game. =)
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