@thejessesnyder turns Q’s into A’s (September 2012)

October 1, 2012 Game Development 7 Comments

At the end of September (2012), I was in the mood to write about some game development topics. Then people starting asking questions and giving topics I could give a short answer to, but were too long for twitter. So, I decided to just ask twitter what they wanted to hear about and I’d try to do my best to give good, honest answers. Below are the questions I could answer without losing my job. If I didn’t answer your question, it means it wasn’t worth getting fired over.

Enjoy!

 

Chris Salerno @HaloFanForLife

@thejessesnyder What stresses are there living up to a storied franchise in Halo? As well, talk about your being the first dev/lead at 343.

The “stress” question comes up quite a bit. I cut my teeth on Call of Duty, one of the largest franchises known to mankind. Having the opportunity to work on CoD taught me about the realities of making AAA games. While there are always surprises, having done it enough times it’s easier to know what to look out for and to avoid mistakes. You learn about what typical problems arise, you get a sense of what is possible to make or what an idea costs to make real, you can identify when something is good and when to push that idea or feature forward (or kill it) and so on. Halo is no different. While the Halo and CoD are very different games in many ways, the way they are developed is not completely dissimilar.

That’s the career side of things anyway. Having enough experience to enjoy the confidence of dealing with problems, and having enough experience to identify when you’ve struck gold.

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