Gastronaut's Small Arms Postmortem

[pipo]

"The creators of Xbox 360 Live Arcade stand-out title Small Arms, previous veterans of XBLA from their work with Fuzzee Fever on the original Xbox Live Arcade, talk about what went right and what wrong during the development of the frenetic multiplayer shooter, giving plenty of insight into developing indie games on console."

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2007/06/_we_ran_the_first.php

 

[Dr. Nick]

Thank you for posting that.

 

[Rangers]

Surprising that such a small team with no QA could use so much multi-threading. Bodes well for the future.

Also, 1GB assets>~40MB.

Small Arms wasn't very good, though. But I understand, with such a small team.

LOL@ "Broken achievements. Dont do it. You'll get threats. Players need their Gamerscore"

 

[DudeMiester]

Surprising that such a small team with no QA could use so much multi-threading. Bodes well for the future.

Personally, I've always thought that working with concurrency isn't inherently difficult. It just requires experience.

 

[aselto]

I liked Small Arms. Visuals were nice and it was ideal to pick up and play for anybody (although there was a bit of learning curve). Spend a couple of hours playing this game with flatmates. Definitely worth my money. It's nice to watch this post mortem.

edit: just watched it. They surely did have a lot of obstacles during development. Hopefully experience gained during development of SA will lead to better games in their future XBLA titles.

 

[pipo]

Thank you for posting that.

No prob.

Here's another new interview on XBLA: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1496/xbox_lives_early_rising_chris_.php?page=1

In the time since its re-launch with the Xbox 360 in late 2005, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade has seen over 65 games appear on the service, with more than 25 million downloads of games and demos – an extraordinary number, even if the exact split between paid and unpaid content is unknown.

After joining Microsoft as studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games in March 2005, Chris Early stepped into the role of Microsoft’s product unit manager for Xbox Live Arcade and Microsoft Casual Games in February, following the departure of Greg Canessa to PopCap Games. Gamasutra spoke to Early recently, and asked about the general state of Live Arcade, the effect that the company’s Live Anywhere push will have on it, and a number of other topics.